


Hive

by MaryPSue



Series: Hive [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (don't worry; the pig is safe), (no promises on the goat though), (slight) gore, Animal Death, Body Horror, Gen, Mind Manipulation, Pines Family Bonding, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-20 17:10:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 32,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9501815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Another summer in Gravity Falls, and things are...weird.Well. Weirder than usual.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I think all of the necessary warnings are up there in the tags. This started with the intent to write a horror story set in the GF-verse, but...I love Pines Family Shenanigans a little too much. The resulting weird mix of fluff and fridge horror is what you see before you.
> 
> Suggested listening for this chapter: "Hold No Guns" by Death Cab for Cutie.

Dipper, unsurprisingly, notices it first.

"Is it just me, or have people been acting...weirder than usual lately?" he asks, from flat on his back on the porch, basking in the heat of the sinking sun and the chill of the water evaporating off of him and the dull, slow ache in all his muscles from running around with Soos ambushing (okay, being ambushed by) Wendy and Mabel with water guns all afternoon. The wood underneath his back is rough and sun-warmed, both splinters and heat slowly working their way into his skin, and from where he lies he can just see a sliver of glaring blue out of the corner of his right eye, past the edge of the sagging porch roof.

"Define 'weirder than usual'," Wendy says, from the couch somewhere to Dipper's left, her voice lazy and languid as the quiet buzz from the trees out ringing the yard. Dipper can't muster the energy to turn and look at her; he remembers her falling sprawled across the cushions, one arm up over the back. As far as he knows, she hasn't moved.

"Yeah, Dipper, this is Gravity Falls -" Mabel starts, and Dipper groans.

"That's why I said 'weirder  _than usual_ ', Mabel. Weirder _than usual_.”

"I dunno, dawgs, Dipper's got a point," Soos, ever the lifesaver, says, and Dipper flops an arm weakly up into the air for Soos to slap palms with. "Like, Abuelita's bridge club's been meeting here while Melody’s up in Portland visiting her sister? And I'm pretty sure when they came over last week two of them were, like, talking to each other. But without talking, doods."

"Wait, really?" Dipper asks, almost interested enough to sit up and look Soos in the eye. Almost, but not quite. "Soos, your abuelita's got a couple of telepaths in her bridge club?"

He hears, rather than sees, Soos shrug. "Dunno. Abuelita threw 'em out for cheating, I didn't have time to ask 'em where they're from."

Before Dipper gets a chance to introduce Soos to the definition of the word 'telepathy', though, the door leading into the Shack creaks open and Stan's heavy footsteps thud out onto the porch, shaking up through Dipper's back until he can feel each one in his chest. "Who wants popsicles?" Stan waits a moment for the chorus of 'me!'s to die down, and then adds, "Well, you better get your wallets ready, then, 'cause these suckers're two - no, five dollars apiece!"

Dipper doesn't see what happens next, but he's pretty sure it involves Wendy and Mabel, a couple of water guns, and grand theft popsicle.

...

Ford, once Dipper gets a chance to talk to him, is a little more receptive.

"Unusual behaviour, you say?" he asks, putting down the soldering iron and raising his mask to look Dipper in the eye. There's a frown creasing his forehead, the kind of distant look that Grunkle Stan gets sometimes when he’s overwhelmed by a returning memory, and Dipper feels a twinge of guilt constrict his chest. "I ought to look into this. It might be nothing, but - better safe than devoured by a being of pure horror from the nightmare realm!" He flashes a bright smile in Dipper's direction, one that doesn't make the guilt squeezing Dipper's ribs together ease at all.

"It's...probably nothing," Dipper says. "Or - if it is, it's definitely not Bill's style. I don't know, it's not like people are really acting any different, they just..." He ends up squeezing two fistfuls of empty air and shrugging, trying to convey something he can't quite put into words.

There's a chill in the basement, even with the portal in a thousand weirdly-shimmering pieces on the floor, a draft that smells of damp and concrete and cold earth that snakes down the back of Dipper's neck and under his vest, making all the hairs stand up in a long line down his spine. The crease in Ford's brow doesn't change.

"Even so," he says, gruff and short, and Dipper waits for the rest of the sentence, a little unsurprised when nothing more is forthcoming. The draft trails like insubstantial fingers down his back. Even so.

...

Dipper's pretty sure that he's been invited along to the graveyard with Wendy and her friends at least partly out of pity, since Mabel's left him behind to go down to Bend for the day with Candy and Grenda to find Grenda a dress for this fundraiser gala Marius invited her to, but he's not complaining. Wendy's friends are cool, Wendy herself is especially cool, and Dipper's not about to turn up his nose at an opportunity to hang out with them. Especially not now that he is, actually, technically a teen himself.

It's a perfect day for it, too - not too hot, a slight breeze ruffling the tops of the trees that ring the graveyard and whipping the tall pillars of cloud overhead into weird and fantastic shapes. Dipper is distracted enough - by the clouds and their enormous shadows racing over the grass, and the birdsong off in the trees somewhere that almost sounds like human voices, and the smell on the wind that promises thunder later, and definitely not by Wendy's hair in the sunlight - that he trips over the handle of a discarded spade and nearly falls face-first into a freshly-dug grave.

Lee catches him while he's still pinwheeling his arms on the edge, reaching out and scooping him up around the waist. "Whoa, careful there, little dude!"

"I'm not little," Dipper grumbles, as Lee balances him back on his feet. He's not. He's grown a full two inches this year. (Never mind that Mabel's grown three, and packed on nearly twenty pounds of pure muscle just from hauling Waddles around. Dipper's gonna catch up one of these days.)

Lee isn't listening. He's peering down into the open pit with an expression halfway between fascination and disgust. "Oh, dude, what is  _that_?"

"Ugh, tell me it's not zombies again," Wendy says, rolling her eyes, but Nate's joined them at the edge of the grave, leaning precariously out over the mouth to get a better look at whatever Lee's seen. Now that he's thinking about it, Dipper thinks he can detect a note of rot in the smell of fresh, wet earth.

He leans cautiously over the lip of the grave, and looks down.

There's something shining in the dirt right at the very bottom of the grave, something yellow-white and gently curved. It looks like a rib.

Robbie cracks his knuckles, stretching with the grin that means he's about to do something phenomenally stupid for attention. "Stand back, ladies, let the professional handle this." He looks around, and then asks, "Hey, where's Tambry? Wasn't she supposed to meet us here?"

"She's your girlfriend, aren't you supposed to be keeping track of stuff like that?" Nate asks. Robbie's ears turn red, and he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie.

"Whatever," he mutters, succinctly.

Wendy nudges him with her shoulder. "Weren't you gonna fight the big bad zombie for us?" she asks, and the blush drains out of Robbie's face so fast Dipper would almost think he's been attacked by a vampire or a giant leech or something. Dipper doesn't think the rib has moved at all; he kind of doubts it's an active zombie, but he's not telling Robbie that.

"A-actually, my knee's been kind of acting up," Robbie stutters, his gaze darting around the group and finding no sympathy. "Otherwise I would totally -"

"Fine, you big baby," Wendy interrupts, unholstering her axe from its usual place at her hip and leaping effortlessly down into the pit. After a moment, her voice floats up from six feet underground. "There's no zombies down here, guys."

"Wait, really?" Robbie asks, and then, defensive, "I mean, I knew that all along, I'd never have let you go down there if -"

"Man, shut up," Lee says, and Robbie's mouth snaps shut, his shoulders curling up around his ears as he shoots a dirty look in Lee's direction.

"What is it?" Dipper calls down to Wendy, who pokes at the rib with the toe of her boot. It falls over, with a small shower of dirt, revealing several pale vertebrae and what looks like half a shattered pelvis.

"Think maybe you should ask what it was," Wendy calls back up. "Looks like...half a raccoon, maybe?" She pauses a moment, turning over more earth with her toe. The smell of rotting that Dipper had noticed earlier rushes up, smacks him full across the face, and he has to swallow down a sudden surge of bile. "I dunno. It's pretty fresh, but it's also pretty stripped. Looks like somebody chewed the bones to get the marrow out."

"Dude," Lee says, halfway between disgust and awe.

"Some _body_?" Robbie asks, a slight quaver in his voice. Wendy shrugs.

"Yeah dude, these look like human teeth marks."

“Wait, how do you know what human teeth -”

“Apocalypse training every year ring a bell, dude?” Wendy shrugs. “And you were all here for the zombie uprising too, you can’t tell me you  _don’t_  know what human teeth marks on bone look like.” She looks around at the boys gathered around the top of the grave. “Seriously, just me?”

"Oh man, does that mean one of the zombies  _is_  loose around here somewhere?" Nate complains.

Robbie mutters a bitter, "It better not be," before giving a resigned sigh and walking over to grab the abandoned spade Dipper'd tripped over. "All right, I'm gonna go tell my parents we got another walker."

"Cool. I'm gonna not hang out in the spooky deserted graveyard with a zombie on the loose," Nate says, and Lee reaches up for a high five.

"Buddy system, bro?"

"You know it."

"Guess that leaves you and me," Wendy calls up to Dipper, who casually steps back from the edge of the pit so she can't see his face. "Is there, like, a ladder up there or something?"

By the time Wendy gets out of the grave, she and Dipper are the only ones left in the graveyard. The clouds overhead have stacked up close against each other, and the patches of shadow that sweep over last longer each time, the warm summer air cut by the chill of the wind. That promised thunderstorm feels a lot closer now.

"It's weird that Tambry ditched," Wendy says, as she vaults over a gravestone, Dipper walking around it beside her. He notices that she hasn't put away her axe. "But you know what's weirder? I haven't had a single notification from her since, like, this morning. And none of the guys said anything about it, but I haven't seen Thompson around for a day or so either."

"Tambry hasn't liked any of your posts since this morning?" Dipper asks, horrified, and Wendy makes a face that's almost a smile but really more of a grimace.

"And not one single status update."

"Wow. That's even worse than the time we almost all got eaten by convenience store ghosts," Dipper remarks, and Wendy nods.

"If this were a horror movie, Robbie'd be stumbling across her strategically-placed body right about...now." She glances back over her shoulder, and when no screams echo out from behind the hill separating them from the funeral home, shrugs. "Guess we're still safely in weird fiction," she cracks, with an elbow-nudge to Dipper's ribs that tells him she means it as a joke.

"Hey, that reminds me - have you tried that book I loaned you yet?" Dipper asks, rather than trying to eke out a nervous chuckle, and Wendy grins.

"Eat, Pray, Lovecraft? Heck yeah I have." She stuffs her axe back into its holster, her smile shrinking. "I gotta admit, though, I think some of it went over my head. And after last summer - I mean, horrifying demonic entities from outside of our dimension just lose some of their terror when you've seen one do a kegstand."

Dipper kind of disagrees, but he doesn't tell Wendy that.

...

The trees are dripping the next morning, needles glittering with leftover droplets of rain. The gravel delta that serves as a parking lot is transformed into a mass of tiny rivers, water rippling into little 'v's as it races over the pebbles. The porch roof drips morosely, the soft hiss and shush of rainwater through the overflowing gutters underlying the quiet dimness of the morning.

Dipper lies snugged down in his bed, watching the pale, greyish-pink triangle of light sink slowly down the wall across from him as the sun rises. The lingering smell of attic, must and dust and something thick and vaguely medicinal that he thinks might be mothballs but also bears a weird resemblance to Stan's cologne, tickles his nose, and Mabel's soft snores from the bed against the other wall mingle with the rush of water down the roof into a soothing white noise. In the quiet, the attic seems vast and full of air and light. The bed is so warm and deep that Dipper doesn't want to move, and each time he blinks, the triangle of light slides a little further down the wall than it did during the last blink.

He only knows for sure he's awake when Stan's heavy fist pounds on the attic door, his voice rattling the thin wood from outside. "Rise and shine, lazybones! We're goin' to the diner for breakfast as a family! This's got everything to do with my love and generosity and nothing to do with the fact I got banned from the grocery store!"

Mabel stretches, yawning, and groans as she pushes herself up into a sitting position. She makes some sleepy noise as Dipper rolls over onto his side, pulling the covers tighter around his shoulders, trying to hold in the warmth. "Mmmmnnnnnnn 'snot morning yet."

"C'mon, Dippingsauce," Mabel yawns at Dipper with about half of her usual enthusiasm. The pink light that floods the attic makes her look, unfairly, much more awake than Dipper feels.

"Sssssummer," Dipper protests, but the soft, dreamy feeling is already draining out of him, wakefulness seeping in to take its place. He scrubs the heel of his right hand against his eyes, pushing back the covers with a yawn of his own. "Somebody tell Grunkle Stan the whole point of summer vacation is staying up late, then sleeping in."

Stan's voice echoes from the hall again. "Kids! C'mon, you're the only ones holding us up!" His voice drops in volume as he continues, "I asked Soos if he wanted to come but he said he had to open the Shack. Told 'im he could just blow it off but he said he had 'integrity', whatever  _that_  is. Hope it ain't catching."

Mabel and Dipper share a look, both trying not to laugh out loud. 

They both fail.

...

It's a full hour before the Pines family piles out of the Stanleymobile and into Greasy's Diner. The whole world smells fresh, like it's been washed clean by the rain, and there's a chill in the air that makes Dipper glad he decided to wear his puffy vest over his thick flannel, despite Mabel's opinion. 

Normally, after a storm like the one last night, the woods would be absolutely alive with birdsong, which is why it doesn't take Dipper longer than the short walk from the diner's parking lot to the door to figure out what's wrong. He nudges Mabel in the shoulder as they crunch across the patch of gravel that might once have held an attempt at a flowerbed but now only sprouts weeds and cigarette butts. "Mabel! Hey, did you notice how quiet it is out here?"

Mabel looks around, at the still-dripping trees, a thoughtful look on her face. "Huh. That's kinda weird. But not Gravity Falls weird," she adds, sternly, as Stan shoulders the door to the diner open, setting the bell over the door jangling and drowning out any odd noises Dipper might have listened for.

After the chill in the morning air, Greasy's even smells warm. Stan leads the way to their usual booth in the back, with a wink in Lazy Susan's direction. Dipper brings up the end of the little train, only to stop short only a few feet in.

Tambry's sitting in the booth nearest the door, and she's with Thompson. Just the two of them.

They both look up when Dipper leans against their table, like he's just interrupted a private conversation. But they definitely hadn't been talking when Dipper had stopped at the booth.

Weird.

"H-hey," Dipper stammers, into the teeth of Tambry's flat, unimpressed stare. "We missed you at the graveyard yesterday." Absently, he realises that her eyes are the exact same shade of green as Thompson's. He's never noticed before. Probably because they're always aimed down at her phone.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry," Tambry says, half-turning like she's done with the conversation. Dipper takes a deep breath, raising his voice slightly.

"Wendy was worried about you guys, she said she hadn't seen any status updates from you all morning," he challenges Tambry, who glances briefly back at him. 

"Yeah, I guess I took like a monster nap." For the first time, a flicker of concern crosses her face, and she says, "Wait, was Robbie worried about me too?"

"Sure, why not," Dipper says. "Why aren't you with him, anyway? You two are still dating, right?"

Concern turns into confusion on Tambry's face, and then clears. She stares at Dipper, eyes narrowed. "Mabel put you up to this, didn't she."

"She...may have," Dipper says. It's not, technically, a lie.

"Well, you can tell her her matchmaking still holds up. Me and Thompson? Never gonna happen." Tambry rolls her eyes, apparently oblivious to the faint 'awwww' from Thompson, deflating slightly in the booth across from her.

"And Thompson! Where were you yesterday, man?" Dipper asks, turning to Thompson, who turns red. "You missed a zombie scare and Wendy finding half a dead raccoon."

"Oh, wow, I'm really sorry I missed out on that," Thompson warbles, sarcastically. Dipper has to cede that one to him.

Before he can ask any more questions, Lazy Susan's voice interrupts from behind Dipper. " 'Scuse me, hon. Soup's on!"

Dipper steps out of the way, and Susan takes his place, setting an enormous platter of eggs and bacon in front of each of the people at the table. Tambry actually groans, her face showing the most emotion Dipper thinks he's ever seen on her. "Finally! Oh my god, I'm so hungry I could eat the entire continent of Australia."

Thompson doesn't say anything, too busy shoveling forkfuls of fried egg into his mouth.

"Okay, well...good to know you're both okay," Dipper says, as Tambry tucks into her own food. He looks over at the table where his family are sitting, meets Ford's questioning gaze over the top of the booth. "I'm gonna...go get my own breakfast."

Thompson manages to swallow his mouthful of bacon for long enough to raise a hand and say, "See you round!" as Dipper walks away from their booth.

"Friends of yours?" Ford asks, as Dipper slides into the booth beside him. Mabel lets out an enormous bark of laughter, leaning across the table to smack Dipper on the arm.

"Friends of  _Wendy's_." Her grin is both knowing and smug.

" _Mabel_ ," Dipper complains, and Mabel presses a hand over her mouth to cover her knowing giggles. Stan laughs, holding up a hand, and Mabel high-fives it, hard. "Seriously, it's not like that."

"I know that!" Mabel chirps. "You're just really easy to tease. Oh, and we ordered you pancakes because you were busy making goo-goo eyes at Tambry." She crosses her arms and leans her elbows against the table, looking intently at Dipper with that same knowing smile. "Or was it Thompson you had your eye on?"

"Oh my god, Mabel," Dipper sputters, unable to completely squash a laugh of his own at the face his sister makes. "Take off your matchmaker hat for five seconds, I'm not looking for an 'epic summer romance'. Neither of them showed up to hang out yesterday and Wendy was worried."

"Just those two?" Ford asks, quiet and serious. Dipper nods, and Ford frowns in thought. "Did you notice anything unusual about either of them during your conversation?"

"Seriously, poindexter? You wanna take a flashlight over there and shine it in their eyes?" Stan complains, then shrugs. " 'Cause if it'll make ya feel better, I'll hold 'em down for ya."

"Stanley, you're just saying that because you'll take any excuse to torment teenagers."

"Hey, I look at that as an unexpected bonus."

Dipper glances out around the side of the booth, but he can't see either Tambry or Thompson from where he's sitting. "I didn't notice anything," he says, at last, when he's sure he's not going to catch another glimpse and there's a break in Stan and Ford's good-natured bickering. "I mean, they both ordered huge breakfasts, but they're also both fifteen, sooo..."

This time, it's Ford who shoots Dipper a knowing smile, though it's far less smug than Mabel's. "Don't worry, my boy, you have more than enough time to hit a growth spurt."

"No way, José!" Mabel shouts, pumping a fist in the air. "Alpha twin for life!"

"Haha. Right. Keep gloating. While you still can," Dipper says, and Mabel sticks out her tongue.

Any further competition is cut short by the tantalising smell of fresh, hot pancakes wafting over the table. All four Pines look up to see Lazy Susan, loaded down with plates piled high with pancake stacks and a bottle of syrup.

A huge smile settles across Stan's face as his eyes land on her, and he reaches up to take the nearest two plates, passing one to Mabel. "Ahhh, a vision of loveliness. And you don't look half bad today either, Susan," he adds, his gaze shifting slightly from, Dipper realises, the pancakes to Susan's face.

"Oh, you old scoundrel," Susan titters, leaning over the table to set a plate of pancakes down in front of Dipper. Steam, barely visible, rises off the stack in little undulating waves, and Dipper's mouth waters.

"Oh, and this must be the mysterious handsome brother I've been hearing so much about!" Susan goes on, putting a platter of French toast and hashbrowns down in front of Ford with a smile and a flutter of her false eyelashes. 

Ford's ears turn red. Stan clears his throat.

"We're identical twins," he mutters, and then, "Susan, doll, wouldja grab us some fresh coffee?"

"Coming right up!" Susan says. She pauses a moment before she turns to leave, though, and Dipper can see the thought drifting across her face. "Say, none of you all seen a white and grey tomcat around, have you? Mister Whiskers got out the other night, the little rascal, and I haven't seen him since."

Mabel and Dipper meet each other's eyes across the table, and Mabel shrugs.

"We will definitely keep an eye out for your cat, Susan!" she says, brightly. "Does he come when you call his name?"

"If he feels like it!" Susan laughs at her own joke - at least, she obviously thinks it's a joke. "Thanks, you folks."

She bustles off towards the kitchen. Stan's got half a pancake stuffed into his mouth almost before she turns her back.

"Slow down, no one's going to try to take it from you," Ford says, fond exasperation colouring his words as he pops open the cap on the bottle of syrup and pours a small lake into the middle of his plate.

It isn't until they're leaving the diner and Dipper glances over at the now-empty booth where Thompson and Tambry had been sitting that he figures out what had rubbed him wrong about their conversation earlier.

The whole time they'd been talking, he hadn't seen Tambry check her phone once.

…

Dipper starts taking notes. It's always been the best way to organise his thoughts, after all, and if he's going to figure out what's going on in Gravity Falls _this_ summer, he's going to need to keep track of every detail, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. He digs out the scuffed blue notebook he's been using as a sort of journal, sort of place to record good ideas or locations for episodes of that ghost hunting show that he's really looking at making now that he has access to the photography lab and the school's A/V equipment, opens to a new page, and scrawls the date and time at the top in blue ink.

He's still slouched on his bed, gnawing absently at the cap of the ballpoint he's using to write with and drumming his fingers against the page, when Mabel comes barrelling in, followed closely by Waddles. Mabel starts yanking open drawers in the dresser and flinging clothes out onto the floor behind her, while her pig trots over to bump his head against Dipper's arm and grunt hopefully up at him. Dipper smiles, and interrupts his pen-chewing to give Waddles a scratch under the chin. He's never seen a pig look quite so blissful.

"Dipper, have you seen my disco ball sweater?" Mabel asks, over her shoulder, and Dipper shrugs, shifting to get both hands free so he can give Waddles a scritch behind both ears at once.

"Thought you left it in Piedmont with the unicorn sweater."

Mabel turns, her eyes wide and her gaze flat and dead, like she's looking through a thousand miles of space. "I would  _never_ ," she says, her voice heavy with quiet horror.

Dipper shrugs one shoulder. "You can look through your sweaters again, but I'm pretty sure you decided you only had room for one more and brought the one with the tinsel sleeves instead."

Mabel looks like she's about to burst into a wail of despair, but stops, snapping her fingers instead. "The tinsel sweater! That'll work." She slams the dresser drawer shut and launches herself at her bed instead, dragging a straining suitcase out from behind the head of the bed with some difficulty. The lid bursts open when she hoists it up into the bed, and a riot of colourful knitwear explodes out.

"Mabel?" Dipper asks, giving Waddles one last scratch before picking his pen back up.

"Yeah?"

"You...you really haven't noticed anything weird about town this visit?" He gnaws on his bottom lip.

Mabel must hear something in his voice, because she drops the handful of sweater she's holding and turns to face Dipper, sitting down on the floor with her back leaning against the box spring and mattress that make up her bed. "Look, we all know you're a paranoid panda. We love you anyway. You wouldn't be Dipper without the occasional wild goose chase after something spooky and supernatural."

Dipper feels himself deflate. He looks down at the chicken scratch of a list scrawled in his notebook, chomps down on the end of his pen and just holds it between his teeth.

"Yeah," he agrees, hollowly.

"But!" Mabel says brightly, and Dipper looks back up, to see her holding up a sweater with a cartoon alien holding a bottle of soda on the front, emblazoned with the slogan 'Take Me To Your Liter'. "That doesn't mean I don't want to go chasing wild geese with you!" She frowns. "Hey, you've got a big nerd-brain, does that expression make any sense to you?"

"I've never really understood it either," Dipper admits, cracking a smile when Mabel bursts out laughing. She gives a little sigh as her laughter dies down, smiling up at Dipper.

"So, let's go chase a wild goose! Who knows, we might even catch one."

...

With Mabel on the case with him, Dipper finally starts to feel like he's making some progress. All they really do is hang out, bum around the Shack with Wendy and tease Soos about his new exhibits or go to the pool or the arcade like they always do or tromp around in the woods, but having someone to talk through all his thoughts with (or...at, Mabel's input isn't always helpful or on-topic, though she does bring him back down to earth when his theories start getting away from him) helps Dipper get a better grasp of what he's seeing, what he's looking for. And Mabel notices stuff that Dipper never would've, or wouldn't have thought was important, like how Nate and Lee haven't had one single run-in with Blubs and Durland since the twins got to town, or how Gompers the goat hasn't been around lately, or how Tambry's mom has started wearing really bold red lipstick. (Dipper's not so sure that last one's really relevant, but he dutifully notes it down anyway. When he looks closer, trying to figure out if he's ever seen her wearing lipstick before, he realises he's never really noticed how much alike Tambry and her mom look. Maybe it's something to do with the striking green of both their eyes.) His little blue notebook fills up in no time.

Unfortunately, what it fills up with doesn't seem to add up to anything. When it was just Tambry and Thompson vanishing and then turning up hungry, and a stripped skeleton in the graveyard, it was pretty easy to point to zombies. But when Dipper and Mabel tag along to the pool with the teens - the  _older_  teens - Robbie mentions that his parents never did find an escaped zombie. He vanishes with Tambry behind the storage shed after that, with a grin that says they're definitely going to make out. 

Dipper doesn't get a chance to ask Robbie any more questions for a couple of days - he's a no-show for paintball the next afternoon, which Dipper tries very hard to pretend to be disappointed about. Robbie's a sore loser and an even worse winner. Tambry and Thompson team up against the rest of the group, their surprisingly flawless teamwork taking everyone down but Wendy, who emerges paint-spattered but victorious. Then the whole group haul their battered selves downtown for ice cream, where the cashier smiles and gives them a ten percent discount. She nods at Tambry and Thompson as they leave, like she knows them from somewhere, and they nod back.

"Okay, did that just happen?" Wendy asks, as they leave the shop, and Nate nods.

"She's usually such a grouch. Just because one time we thought it'd be funny to order all forty-two flavours in one cone."

Dipper pulls out his notebook.

...

The Shack is dead at ten o'clock in the morning, the early morning rush of people who plan their trips down to the minute having come and gone, the more sane population who sleep in on vacation not yet starting to trickle in. Dipper has set up camp on a stool by the cash register with a crossword puzzle book, facing the door so he's ready for anyone who might come in. Wendy slumps over the counter by the register, her face in her arms, and lets out the occasional groan. Mabel, sitting on the counter beside her, is busily braiding  and unbraiding Wendy's long hair.

"Why are we even open at this hour," Wendy complains, and Soos, leaning against the counter in his full Mr. Mystery regalia, frowns.

"What if some, like, little orphan kids came from like, deepest darkest Canada and the only thing they wanted to see was the Mystery Shack and it was closed, dood? Do you want to be the one to crush the dreams of little orphan children?"

"Uuuuuuugh," Wendy growls. "Stan was a horrible boss, but at least he never tried to make me actually care about this stupid job."

"Why are you so tired, anyway?" Mabel asks, and Soos nods.

"Yeah, dawg, what's the dilly? Yo."

Wendy doesn't raise her head from her arms this time, her voice muffled against the wood of the counter as she says, "Stupid Robbie's been bugging me to come to one of his stupid shows for, like, ever, so I actually went last night and that jerk didn't even show up. We waited for like an hour, then the band came on and did two songs without him, and then they just left."

"Sounds like you kind of dodged a bullet there," Dipper says, and Wendy groans again before pushing herself up to lean heavily on the counter on one elbow, her face in her hand. Mabel's braid creations slowly unravel around her head, giving her a little halo of stray red hairs.

"Look, I know you two have your, like, blood feud or whatever going on, but Robbie's still my friend. I guess. And that band is, like, the most important thing in the world to him." She frowns. "He wouldn't just flake out like that unless something was wrong. And I've tried texting and calling him, but he won't pick up his phone."

"Did you ask Tambry?" Mabel suggests, shrugging at the state of Wendy's hair and starting to pick apart the braids she'd put in.

"Tried that. She keeps saying he's 'fine, but sleeping'. Like, is he sick? Were they out together last night? Where the heck would they have even gone? And if he's been asleep all this time she should maybe take him to a hospital -"

The bell over the door jangles, and all four people around the counter look up.

"...hi," Pacifica Northwest says, and coughs into one hand. "I wanted to see whether Mabel was up for a rematch of last year's minigolf game." She tugs at the hem of her sweater, a shaggy yellow monstrosity with a llama on the front that Dipper vaguely remembers Mabel having given to Pacifica sometime during Weirdmageddon. "Just for...fff...un. Fun. That's that thing where there aren't any prizes or trophies and nobody really cares who wins, right?"

"Absolutely!" Mabel shouts, leaping down off the counter. She charges up to Pacifica and slings an arm around Pacifica's fuzzy-sweatered shoulders. Dipper's seen boiled lobsters less red than the shade Pacifica turns. "Wait, didn't the Lilliputtians swear eternal vengeance against us after last time?"

“Oh, you didn’t hear,” Pacifica says, still red, trying very hard to sound indifferent. “When the minigolf course opened up again this summer, none of the mechanisms were working. The Lilliputtians were gone. The minigolf course had to buy all new machinery from out of state.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” Dipper says, putting down his crossword. “The Lilliputtians are  _gone_? Where’d they go?  _Why’d_  they go?”

Pacifica shrugs. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Those little golf-ball-shaped weirdos can stay far, far away from me forever if they want to.”

Mabel’s giving Dipper a weird look, a ‘don’t make this into a monster hunt’ look, but Dipper ignores it.

“Can I come with you?” he asks.

...

There are no Lilliputtians at the minigolf course.

There are no tiny alien creatures piloting half a man-suit in the bowling alley.

There’s someone different delivering the mail, a reedy person Dipper doesn’t recognise. They don’t have anywhere near as much body hair as the previous mailman. (Or body odor.)

There are a few gaping holes in the sap under the abandoned church, but no mysterious shadows swooping overhead, no terrifying screeches in the distance. No sign of dinosaurs.

The lake is still and silent.

...

After hours of looking for something, anything, to prove he hadn’t just dreamed the entirety of last summer, Dipper finally finds the Multibear crouched at the back of his cave, deep in conversation with his many heads as he tosses things - mostly rocks, from what Dipper can see, but then again, it’s not like the Multibear has a lot other than rocks - into a sack the size of a compact car.

“Multibear,” Dipper says, and the Multibear starts, banging his top head on a low overhang.

“Dipper!” he says, but takes a step backwards. Dipper freezes in the mouth of the cave. Some of the heads around the Multibear’s waist are baring or snapping their teeth in his direction, and his friend has crouched down, into a position that would be easy to spring from. It’s hard to tell - bear faces don’t exactly show emotion the same way human faces do - but Dipper’s pretty sure the expression the Multibear’s wearing right now isn’t one of unfettered delight. “What brings you all the way out here?”

“I wanted to say hi, I haven’t seen you yet this summer,” Dipper says, looking around. The cave looks, if possible, even barer than the last time he saw it. “Dude, are you packing up? Are you  _leaving_  Gravity Falls?”

The Multibear fidgets. “Not...as such,” he says, his rich, deep voice taking on a note of disappointment. 

“Seriously? Come on, tell me. What’s going on?” Dipper asks, wishing he sounded more like a cool action hero demanding information and less like an upset kid whining about something he doesn’t understand. “I can’t find any sign of any supernatural creatures around Gravity Falls this summer, it’s like you guys all just disappeared. And everybody in town is acting -” He struggles for words, and ends up just going with, “weirder than usual. And I can’t figure out  _why_.”

Dipper’s not expecting the Multibear to heave a sigh of relief, and pad gently down the hall to drape one enormous paw over his shoulder. The paw swallows Dipper’s shoulder and nearly covers his arm down to the elbow, heat radiating out from it like a blast furnace. This close, Dipper can smell the gamey, musty scent of bear, strong enough to make his eyes water.

“Dipper,” the Multibear says gravely, “I am sorry to hear that the recent happenings in Gravity Falls have given you cause for concern, but I must confess I am glad to hear you questioning what is taking place. I must admit that for a moment, I feared -” He bites off the end of his sentence.

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Dipper asks. He’s not entirely sure what the Multibear’s talking about, but he has a strong feeling that he’s going to want to keep listening.

“I hope I am not leaving,” the Multibear says, “only retreating for a time. Something has emerged in Gravity Falls which has made it exceedingly dangerous for my kind.”

Dipper sucks in a breath between his teeth. There’s a chill in the cave, a damp breath from its depths that makes a shiver walk its way slowly down his spine. “What?”

The Multibear shakes one head, the brow of his main head furrowing. “I myself am not certain what, exactly, has occurred - or is occurring - in your town, but there are whispers throughout the forest, between those of us who know the ways of weirdness. I must warn you. Something very dangerous walks among you. It is a very old, very canny enemy, and it may wear the face of one you trust the most.”

“I thought we beat Bill,” Dipper mutters, and the Multibear gives his shoulder a short squeeze.

“Unfortunately, Bill Cipher is not the only evil in this world.”

…

 “Whatsa matter?” Mabel asks, as she slides into the backseat of the Stanleymobile to nestle beside Dipper, motioning for Pacifica to follow. “You look like somebody just pointed out the ghost behind you.”

Dipper spins to look behind him so fast that his head throbs, and Mabel laughs, giving him a shove in the arm. 

“I’m joking!” Her laughter dies away, though, when Dipper doesn’t join in. Pacifica pushes her golf clubs along the floor of the Stanleymobile, and Mabel unthinkingly lifts her feet to make room, not taking her eyes off Dipper’s face. “Seriously, bro, you look super spooked. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Dipper admits. 

Pacifica slides into the seat beside Mabel, and pulls the door closed behind her with a solid, final-sounding slam. 

“You don’t  _know_?” Mabel asks, as she buckles herself into her seat, and Dipper shrugs.

“I mean, I know what  _happened_. I’m not sure what it means, though.” Dipper tugs on his own seatbelt, before remembering he hadn’t taken it off when the Stanleymobile had pulled to a stop. 

“Oh, well, that’s different,” Mabel says. “Grunkle Stan? Can Pacifica stay over?”

“Hey, it ain’t my house,” Stan calls back from the driver’s seat, with a shrug. Mabel takes this as a ‘yes’, evidently, judging by her squeal of delight.

“Thanks,” Pacifica says, trying to buckle her own seatbelt and fumbling it, painfully. Even though her face is pointed down, all her concentration apparently on the buckle, what Dipper can see past her probably-bottle-blonde bangs is bright crimson again. “I know you’re poor and everything so having an extra mouth to feed is probably a big strain on your resources -”

“Friendly advice? You should’ve stuck with just ‘thanks’,” Dipper interrupts. Pacifica shrugs, finally clicking her seatbelt into place and burrowing her face down into the collar of her fuzzy llama sweater.

“You kids all properly restrained and not likely to go flying through the windshield?” Stan asks, meeting Dipper’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Dipper nods. “Great! Now nobody’s rich parents can sue me if I crash their kid into a tree.”

The Stanleymobile peels out of the minigolf course parking lot at speeds that are probably unsafe even for drivers who can actually see the road.

Stan asks, with practiced casualness, about the game after about five minutes of driving, and Dipper lets Mabel’s excited - and, like everything else ever to come from Mabel, wildly embellished - blow-by-blow recap of the game, with colour commentary from Pacifica, wash over him, gently eroding the tight knot of panic still pulsing in his chest. 

He digs in his backpack and pulls out his notebook, trying to take advantage of the dying orange glow of sunset to scribble down notes on everything he’s discovered so far today.

The Multibear’s warning still unsettles him. Dipper looks around, at Pacifica’s look of indignant embarrassment, Stan’s fond smile in the rearview mirror as he stares at the road, his sister’s happy, laughing face. 

_... it may wear the face of one you trust the most._

Feeling slightly sick, Dipper closes his notebook, and tucks it back inside his backpack.

...

He’s woken bright and early the next morning by Pacifica’s shriek.

Dipper tumbles out of bed half-blinded by sleep, and promptly trips on the blankets he’s somehow entangled himself with, slamming face-first to the floor. His jaw cracks against the bare wood, and Dipper smells copper, tastes it in the back of his mouth. 

The pain hits him a moment later, when he’s unwound his legs from the blankets and pushed himself to his feet. He clutches his chin as he tears down the stairs, towards the source of the scream. If Pacifica’s freaking out because she saw a spider or a box of store-brand cereal or something, he’s going to be so mad.

But it’s not any of the above. Pacifica’s standing in her bare feet and one of the grunkles’ old t-shirts, which is obviously serving her as a nightshirt, in the middle of the kitchen, her eyes brimming with horror and one shaking finger pointing at the abomination that dominates the kitchen table. “What - what is  _that_?” she demands, as Dipper skids on sock feet around the doorframe and into the kitchen.

Dipper takes one look at the half-formed thing on the table and breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s just one of Grunkle Stan’s taxidermy monsters. Soos was getting him to make a bunch while the Stans are inland, he’s tried to pick it up himself but Stan has more practice. And more ideas that don’t involve tentacles.”

“ _Taxidermy monsters?”_ Pacifica demands. She hugs her own arms as Dipper steps forward to inspect the thing a little closer. 

“Yeah, Grunkle Stan puts them together out of bits of a bunch of different dead animals and then passes them off as nonexistent ones. They’re a big hit at the Shack.” There’s glue spread out across the table, glue and wire and foam and clay, little chisels and brushes and scalpels and needles and other tools of the taxidermy trade that Dipper is surprised to see surrounding the thing in the middle of the table. “I’m honestly surprised he actually knows how to use all this junk. I saw him staple the head onto one once. Not with a special stapler or anything, just an office stapler.”

“Where...does he  _get_  the...bits of dead animals?” Pacifica asks, her discomfort clear even as she takes a slow, careful step forward. Dipper notices that she keeps a wary eye on the thing on the table, especially the places where the fur peels back to reveal shining bone.

“Usually it’s roadkill,” Dipper admits, leaning in closer. The armature Stan’s put together has the thing standing a little like a velociraptor, and he’s pretty sure the hind legs are stolen from a chicken, but he’s having a little trouble identifying the animal that makes up the foundation of the made-up monster.

It takes him a moment to realise that the marks he’s seeing on the bones weren’t made by a clumsy taxidermist, but by teeth. Blunt, flat teeth.

“ _Usually?”_ Pacifica says. 

“Sometimes it’s the carcass from last night’s chicken dinner,” Dipper admits. He gently tugs the fur down over the thing’s skull, noticing as he does how soft it is. 

The animal’s pelt, once properly spread out, is tabby-patterned, in a soft grey and white.

“Think we found Mister Whiskers,” he mutters, under his breath.

…

Pacifica leaves around lunchtime, thanking Mabel and Soos in her awkward, halting way. Honestly, it’s nice that she’s trying, but it’s painful to listen to sometimes, especially when Pacifica starts offering to buy things for people ‘so you don’t have to live such sad, miserable, deprived little lives anymore’. Dipper retreats to the attic, to write in his notebook and to read over what he’s already written and to think.

He finds Stan in the kitchen, shortly after Pacifica’s left and Dipper dares descend onto the main floor again. Dipper was really looking for Ford, to hand over his notebook and talk about his observations, but this is a golden opportunity. Stan’s carefully and painstakingly reapplying the fur to the skeleton along the spine with glue, obviously deep in concentration. He doesn’t look up when Dipper walks in, just says, “Bump this table and I’ll stuff you instead.”

Dipper holds up both hands, palms out, taking a respectful step back. The smell of the glue that Stan’s using is foul and inescapable, and Dipper’s pretty sure he can feel it killing his brain cells. “Where’d you get the cat carcass from?”

Stan grunts, and then doesn’t make another sound. Just when Dipper’s starting to think he’s not going to get an answer, Stan says, “Found it. Dumpster by the minigolf.” He paints another line of glue, carefully sticks the very centre of the tabby stripe directly onto the bones. Dipper’s pretty sure that’s not how you do taxidermy, but then again, he’s never tried. “Seemed a shame to let good bones go to waste.”

“Was it just bones?” Dipper asks, watching as the skeleton slowly disappears behind its fur coat. He hadn’t noticed before, while Pacifica was still here, but there are large, roughly oval chunks missing from its pelt.

Stan takes a step back from his handiwork, surveying it thoughtfully with one hand curled around his chin. “Yeah, yeah. Bones and the pelt. Figured some amateur’d tried to stuff it proper, realised they had no idea what they were doing, and ditched it.”

“Did it occur to you that that might be the cat Susan was missing?” Dipper asks, and Stan finally turns that thoughtful gaze on him instead of the taxidermy creature. Dipper can't - doesn't want to - examine the rush of relief that floods through him when he sees Stan's eyes, the same old brown as always, no slitted pupils or eerie yellow glow.

“D’you wanna be the one to tell her?”

“No, I just -” Dipper’s tongue seems to shrivel up. “Wouldn’t it be rough on her if she came up here one day and -”

“Kid, none of the locals visit this tourist trap,” Stan scoffs, and then pauses, thinking. “Except the mayor. Really loves his pumanthers. Anyway. What’s with the sudden interest in taxidermy?”

“It’s...interesting?” Dipper tries. Stan snorts.

“Interesting, my Aunt Fanny. You chasing a monster, kid?”

Dipper rubs his upper arm with one hand. “I think so.”

“Well, don’t use this guy as bait.” Stan turns back to the taxidermy creation, sucks in a short breath, and then leans down to paint glue across a rib.

…

The last tour runs at six-thirty. The Mystery Shack closes at seven.

Grenda and Candy show up at seven-oh-one, with a large bag full to bursting with brightly-coloured snack foods, various cosmetics, DVDs featuring a generically-nonthreatening-looking forty-year-old actor wearing an overstuffed pirate costume, and something that looks suspiciously like hair dye lurking at the bottom. Mabel greets them at the door with excited shrieks and giggles, and then they all vanish upstairs with a lot of conspiratorial whispers and more giggles. Dipper would put ten-to-one odds that the next time he goes to use the bathroom up there, the sink will be stained neon pink and blue.

The attic will probably be occupied for the near foreseeable future, so Dipper takes the book he’s reading (by a former ghostwriter for the Siblings Brothers and Francy Clue, technically aimed at adults, but then, Dipper is pretty mature for his age, if he does say so himself) and heads down to the living room, to see what his grunkles and Soos are up to. As it turns out, they're sprawled in front of the TV, Stan slouched on the couch Soos had added after he'd taken over the Shack, grousing about a dropped stitch in the bundle of half-finished knitting that lies in his lap. Ford sits next to him, nodding along and holding the ball of yarn that feeds into to the thing taking shape under Stan's knitting needles with one hand while he thumbs through a well-read book with the other.

"Wow, Grunkle Stan, I didn't know you knit," Dipper says, pausing by the armchair Soos himself has settled down in, facing the TV set.

"Yeah, your sister gave me some lessons over the internet while we were at sea," Stan grumbles, not looking up from the...garment?...he's picking at. "Not a lot to do between monster attacks."

"It's 'over video chat', Stanley, the video chat merely uses the internet as a method of transmission," Ford corrects him, turning a page in his book, and Stan huffs.

"That's what I said, isn't it? Over the internet."

"You can just say 'on Skope', Mr. Pines," Soos says, and Stan drops his knitting in his lap, throwing both hands up in the air. 

"Your sister showed me through the magic talking picture box, kid," he says to Dipper. 

Ford and Soos share a long-suffering look, which Stan ignores.

"What're she and those friends of hers up to, anyway?" he continues, and then shakes his head. "Wait, scratch that, I don't think I wanna know. Just tell me if they're gonna want the TV and whether they got any good snacks."

"I think they're definitely going to want the TV," Dipper says. "What're you guys watching, anyway?"

"Huh? Oh." Stan glances briefly at the set. "I have no idea, kid, I've been fighting with this row for half an hour."

"The news ends in five minutes and then 'Resignation Street' comes on," Soos supplies helpfully. "Louise's ex-husband came back from Guernsey and now he's trying to get the pub closed down, and Geoff's stepdaughter ran away from rehab for her online shopping addiction on the night of Ted and Twyla's wedding. High drama, dood."

"...Think I'll pass," Dipper says, holding up his book.

"Actually, Dipper, I'd like to speak with you," Ford says, and then looks up from his own book and beams. "Oh! Catherine Sharp! She ghost-wrote 'The Table-Turning Turntable', didn't she?"

"Yeah! It's probably my, uh, second-favourite of the Siblings Brothers books?" Dipper agrees, flopping down to sit beside his great-uncle on the couch.

"Really? My favourite was always -" Ford starts, and Dipper joins him as he says, " 'The Puzzle of the Purloined Puzzle-box'!"

"Geez, you two, don't get nerd all over the couch," Stan grumbles, but he's smiling.

"The twist ending just gets me every time!" Dipper says, too excited to let Stan's teasing slow him down. "I mean, I never would've guessed that -"

"Hey!" Stan interrupts, suddenly gruff. "No spoilers, I'm only halfway through it."

"Stanley, you're reading the Siblings Brothers mysteries?" Ford asks, turning to face his twin. 

"Yeah, and not a word outta you about it, Mister Smarty-pants," Stan snaps.

"I didn't mean to - I'm merely surprised. You always said you hated them." Ford raises an eyebrow. "And books in general."

Stan glares down at his knitting. "Yeah, well, I always said I didn't need glasses, neither, and look at me now."

"Hey, Mr. Pineses? They're signing off, Reggie'll be starting any minute now," Soos interrupts, drawing Dipper's attention back to the TV.

"Soos, how many times do I gotta tell you," Stan says, as the news anchor finishes his signoff. "I'm not your boss anymore, you can just call me Stan."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Pines! It just feels... _wrong_."

"Was - was that Toby Determined announcing?" Dipper asks. "Wow, can't believe he stuck with that...Bodacious T thing."

Stan glances over. "Yeah, it's obnoxious and ugly, perfect for him." He squints at the screen as the first morose notes of the Resignation Street theme start to play. "Wonder what happened to that Shandra Jimenez, she sure was a lot easier on the eyes."

"Me too," Dipper mutters. "Grunkle Ford, are you really invested in this soap opera, or can we talk now?"

"Hm? Oh, yes!" Ford says, looking up from the screen. "Yes, I have some theories about the unusual behaviour you've noticed amongst the townsfolk -"

"You two are still on that?" Stan asks, and though he sounds impatient, sarcastic, Dipper thinks he hears a note of unease underneath it.

Ford ignores him. "But, first, I  _would_  like to know whether Cecil will be able to recapture Vicky's escaped alpaca."

"After the show, then," Dipper says, with a smile, and cracks open his book.

...

Cecil doesn't, as it turns out, recapture Vicky's escaped alpaca - instead, the alpaca turns up at Ted and Twyla's wedding, interrupting the vows to take a bite out of the bouquet. Mabel, Candy, and Grenda come stampeding downstairs shortly after that, shouting something that sounds vaguely like a sea shanty run through autotune. They enter into pitched negotiations with Stan and Soos over control of the TV set, and Ford motions towards the kitchen. He pushes himself up off the couch, leaving Stan's yarn in his abandoned seat, and Dipper follows.

The wall between the kitchen and the living room muffles the din somewhat, Grenda's impressive bass occasionally rumbling over the tinny music from the TV. The sun has just started to dip into the treeline, and the light pours low and thick across the table. With a little distance, in the reaching shadows and orangey light cast by early sunset, the cheerful noise of Dipper's family in the other room takes on an eerie quality. He catches himself thinking that, if he were directing a horror movie, right about now is when he'd start to fade out the voices from the living room and start to introduce some quiet, creepy strings to the score.

Ford’s face is solemn, his voice low as he lays the book he’d been thumbing through earlier out across the kitchen table. “Based on both the information you’ve provided and my own research and investigations, I have a theory about the cause of this unusual behaviour you’ve observed.” He presses a finger against one of the open pages of the book, right beside where Dipper notices Ford’s own handwriting filling the margin. “People disappearing, those who reappear coming back ravenous - for protein-rich foods, if your observations can be extrapolated - the appearance of carcasses with human bite-marks - the casual observer could be forgiven for mistaking this for an epidemic of zombification, but I believe it’s something more like -  _this_!”

Dipper looks down at the page in front of him, his eyes widening as he reads. “You think there’s a wendigo in Gravity Falls?” He kind of wishes he had a pen to click. Or gnaw on. “Actually, that makes a lot of sense, they’re native to the area, aren’t they?”

“Yes, which would explain the warning you received from -” 

“The Multibear!" Dipper slams both hands down on the table. “Okay, so if it’s a wendigo, how do we get rid of it?”

“Well,” Ford starts, bending over the book, and it’s then that Mabel’s voice rings from the doorway.

“And here you see two nerds in their natural habitat.” She grins at Dipper when he looks up, jerking her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the living room. “You guys wanna watch Pirates of the Theme Park with us? This’s the eighth and a half one, where Captain Jim gets kidnapped by mermaids!” She leans in closer, swinging from one hand that she’s hooked around the doorframe. “Mermando told me his cousin was an extra! She’s in it for about five seconds in the drowning scene!”

“Really? They hire actual mermaids as extras in Hollywood?” Dipper asks, and Mabel laughs.

“No, silly, she’s a porpoise!”

“Oh. Of course. That makes perfect sense. Of course a mermaid’s cousin is a porpoise.” Dipper shakes his head. “Gotta say, that makes a whole lot more sense though. Especially when you consider how terrible most movie mermaids look. CGI is not kind.”

“Yeah, they’re waaaayyy hotter in real life,” Mabel says. “So, you two coming or not?”

Dipper looks over, meets Ford’s eyes.

“We won’t be able to do much more tonight,” Ford says. “Research, perhaps. We’ll have to determine who the wendigo is, and whether they’ve passed the curse along to anyone else, and I need to refresh my memory on how to detect and properly destroy them. Until we know who we’re looking for, we can’t act.”

“I’m gonna pretend I understood any of that,” Mabel says, swinging back and forth from the doorframe. 

“Grunkle Ford’s pretty sure that there’s a wendigo on the loose somewhere in town and that’s why we keep noticing weird – _weirder than usual_ things going on,” Dipper says. “Do you have any idea who it might be? Seen anybody, I don’t know, handing out self-help books called ‘How To Taste Delicious’?”

Mabel laughs, and shakes her head. “You could start with Lazy Susan, her secret recipes are sure good at fattening people up,” she suggests. Dipper glances in Fords direction, shrugs.

“It’s as good a starting point as any.” Ford slams the book on the table closed, scooping it up. “I’m going to go retrieve my old research notes, I’m certain I have information about the established cryptids and monsters of the area from when I was writing my grant proposal.”

“I’ll look online,” Dipper starts, and Ford shakes his head, smiling. 

“Unless Stanley or Soos have taken a notion to clean out the attic lately, I know exactly where my old notes are. And I think it might be a good idea to bring them down to review - in the living room, while we watch Captain Jim get kidnapped by mermaids.”

Mabel beams like a small sun. “Awesome!” 

…

Wendy hasn’t arrived for work by the time Dipper’s ready to leave in the morning. 

He tries not to dwell on it, but his eye keeps drifting back to the empty space behind the register the longer he stands in the doorway of the gift shop waiting for his great uncle, like it’s a black hole that’s swallowed Wendy up and is now trying to suck Dipper in too. It’s a relief when Ford finally pushes aside the vending machine, a big black case slung across his back by a strap that crosses his chest. He doesn’t say what’s in it, and Dipper doesn’t ask.

“I have a theory,” Ford says, as he crosses the gift shop. “About where the wendigo is hiding during daylight hours. But it will require one of us to go into the den of the creature itself to prove. I - I’m not going to bring you with me, this time.” Something like fear flickers across his face, so fast that it’s gone before Dipper can really be sure he’s even seen it in the first place. It’s replaced by a huge, cheerful, reassuring smile, one that even to Dipper looks unconvincing. “So I’m going to drop you off in town. If I’m not back to pick you up by sunset, assume the worst and avenge my death.”

“That’s...not exactly reassuring,” Dipper says, as Ford strides to the door and yanks it open, the chimes hanging over the door jingling merrily. Ford stops and looks over his shoulder, with another broad, sunny grin.

“Oh! And if I come back after sunset, I might be one of them. You might be able to tell by sprinkling me with wolfsbane and holy water, but that’s mostly for werewolves.” He pauses, looking thoughtful. “Though if you’re that close and I am one of them, I will almost certainly try to eat you, which should remove all doubt.”

“Again, not super reassuring,” Dipper says, as he follows his great-uncle out the door.

He glances back one last time at the cash register, as though Wendy will have magically appeared there in the five seconds since he last looked, but the blonde wood of the Shack’s walls is the only thing that looks back.

...

They only make it away with the Stanleymobile because Soos shows up with a tour group just as Stan's starting to tear into Ford for trying to take his baby without asking. Dipper slips into the passenger seat and shuts the door as Stan's trying to argue that there's no way Soos can make him work register while Wendy’s away, he doesn’t even  _work_  here, also he is the one, the only, the original Mr. Mystery, he built this place from nothing, Soos -

Ford drops Dipper off at the diner, with another admonition to be careful, to watch his back. The sky is a perfect, crisp blue, the sunlight clear as crystal, but there’s a glacial bite on the breeze that makes Dipper shiver as he steps out of the musty, stuffy warmth of the car.

Lazy Susan looks up and smiles as Dipper steps through the door into the comforting smell of pancakes and bacon and maple syrup, setting the chimes jangling a cheerful discord. She’s not the only one. Half the diner’s clientele all look up with her, both familiar and unfamiliar faces smiling at Dipper with oddly placid expressions. He feels uncomfortably like he just stepped into a spotlight.

Thankfully, everyone but Susan turns back to their food and their quiet conversations as soon as the door slams behind Dipper. Susan waves, beaming, as Dipper cautiously crosses the diner to the counter, watching warily around him in case any of the unusually-interested diner folk spring out at him. There’s something different about Lazy Susan, about her smile, but Dipper can’t quite put his finger on what.

“Well, hey there! What can I getcha?” Susan glances back over her shoulder at the kitchen, smile dimming a little as she turns back to Dipper. “ ‘Fraid we’re running short on sausage and bacon, but I can do you a stack of pancakes - or maybe my special secret ingredient omelette?”

“Is the secret ingredient coffee?” Dipper asks, and Susan belly-laughs, before turning a mock glare in his direction. 

“Now, who’s the snitch who told you?”

Dipper tries to laugh, but it comes out nervous and croaky. A couple of the people who’d looked up when he’d walked in are echoing Susan’s glare, and the back of his neck is prickling. “Lucky guess?”

Susan’s smile comes back bright as ever. The other eyes on Dipper don’t turn away, though, and the weird prickling on the back of his neck doesn’t go away. “Well, aren’t you Mister Smartypants! So! You want one?”

“Um, I’m good, thanks,” Dipper says. “Did - did you ever find out what happened to your missing cat?”

“You know, it’s the funniest thing,” Susan says, thoughtfully. “Mister Whiskers never did come back, and now all my other fur babies are missing.”

“I’m...really sorry to hear that,” Dipper says. “You seemed really upset about losing Mister Whiskers, this must be a huge deal.”

Susan shrugs. “What’s that thing they say about letting go of things you love, again?”

“I think they usually say ‘don’t’,” Dipper says. “You haven’t noticed anything...weird about anybody who’s come by the diner lately, have you?”

“This  _is_  Gravity Falls, hon,” Susan says, almost pityingly, then claps both hands together. “Are you making another internet television video?”

“Not...this time,” Dipper answers. He’s pretty sure it’s not just his imagination that more heads have turned in his direction, more pairs of unusually piercing eyes fixed on his face. “You’re sure you haven’t - you said you were running low on bacon. Who’s been eating all of it?”

“Everybody!” Susan says, delightedly, like it should be obvious. There’s something a little too earnest about her smile, a little impatient, strained at the edges. Dipper can’t remember if her visible eye was always that green. “Don’t you know, everybody wakes up hungry!”

Dipper takes a half-step back, bumps up against one of the stools along the counter. “Wakes up from what?”

“From  _sleeping_ , silly!” Susan laughs. She hasn’t moved, and, as far as Dipper can tell, neither has anyone else, but he still has the uneasy feeling that they’re closing in around him. “It’s actually very refreshing, you should give it a try!”

“Thanks, but, uh, I’m good,” Dipper says, trying to casually ease his way around the stool to back away across the diner. He’s not sure what, exactly, Susan’s referring to, but somehow he gets the feeling it’s not going to bed before ten.

He turns to go out the door and slams straight into a wall of pure muscle. Dipper looks up, and farther up, to the pair of sharp green eyes staring down at him over a bush of red beard topping a mountain of flannel. Dipper’s heart stutters in his chest for the skin of a second, before Manly Dan Corduroy gives a rumbly chuckle unlike anything Dipper’s ever heard from him before and steps out of the way, holding the diner door open for Dipper as he does.

“Come back soon, hon,” Susan calls, and, when Dipper turns, lifts her drooping eyelid with two fingers and lets it drop again. “Wink!”

Dipper’s halfway across the parking lot before he slows down, before he really even registers that he’s running full-tilt across the cracked asphalt.

He could swear that, when he’d looked back, something under the skin of Susan’s face had  _shifted_.

…

Going back through town is strange, now.

Dipper feels jittery and jumpy, like he’s had too much caffeine or too little sleep or a combination of both. The light is bright and stark through the scraps of cloud that hang around the horizon like they’ve snagged on the tops of the trees, and shadows hug the sides and corners of buildings, dark and sharp, like they’re waiting to pounce. The afternoon heat is starting to build, but a shiver works its way down his back anyway. He keeps looking back over his shoulder, feeling eyes fixed on him. He never actually catches anyone looking, but - but.

Dipper’s looking back, trying to work out if the man he can see in the window of the mattress store is really watching him. He’s not looking where he’s going.

The collision takes him by surprise, knocking him back off his feet. He hits the sidewalk hard, hissing as his elbow scrapes against the sidewalk, the rough grit stinging as it tears his skin.

“Hey, watch it, kid,” a familiar voice snaps, and Dipper looks up to see Robbie frowning down at him. Beside him, Tambry turns to glance down at Dipper as well. Her green eyes are almost luminous under the shadow of her bangs.

“Oh hey, you’re bleeding,” Tambry says, her gaze locking onto Dipper’s elbow. 

Robbie’s eyes follow, like mirror images of Tambry’s, and linger hungrily on the trickle of blood working its way down Dipper’s arm, flashing an eerie green in his sallow face. 

Dipper claps a hand over the scrape, backing away as he scrambles to his feet. “It’s fine, it’s just a scrape!”

Tambry looks questioningly at Dipper, but when he takes another step back, she shrugs and flops an arm loosely across to hit her boyfriend in the chest with the back of her hand. “Well, at least apologise, loser.”

Robbie rolls his eyes, but he says, “Sorry I ran into you or whatever.” They step around Dipper, starting to walk away, but Robbie looks back over his shoulder, pointing one finger straight at Dipper’s nose. “But seriously, watch where you’re going, you little -”

“ _Robbie_.” Tambry hooks a hand into Robbie’s hoodie strings and hauls him around to walk beside her. A moment later, her hand drops to interlace her fingers with his.

Dipper keeps backing away from them, before he realises he’s one hundred percent more likely to bump into someone else that way. He spins, just in time to see the Stanleymobile pull up to the curb alongside him. Dipper hurries over, heaving a sigh of relief as he throws open the passenger-side door. “Great-uncle Ford?”

Ford’s face is grim, and he waves Dipper into the car with a motion that’s almost frantic. “Dipper, get inside. Quickly!”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Dipper says, sliding into the passenger seat and slamming the door behind him. Ford doesn’t wait for him to finish buckling his seatbelt, but peels away from the curb with a squeal of tires, his mouth set in a grim line and his eyes fixed on the road. “Whoa, have you been taking driving lessons from Grunkle Stan?” 

Ford, if he even hears Dipper, ignores the question. “I need to get back to my lab as soon as possible. It appears that I have...gravely misinterpreted the nature of the threat.”

“I was sort of starting to think our wendigo theory might be a little off-base,” Dipper agrees, finally clicking his seatbelt into place as they take a corner on what Dipper’s pretty sure are only two wheels. “What’s the rush?”

Ford turns to look at Dipper for the first time since Dipper got into the car, staring intently at Dipper’s eyes. He turns back to the road, apparently satisfied, just in time to swerve around a deer that darts across the road. 

“Our explorations in the alien spaceship last summer appear to have disturbed more than just the security drones,” he says, at last. “I can’t be certain just what we’re dealing with until I run further tests, but - I believe I have the source contained in the trunk of this car.”

“Seriously? Oh man, Grunkle Stan’s really gonna kill us,” Dipper says. 

“Don’t worry, I’m sure the stains will come out of the upholstery - and even if they don’t, I’m not certain they’ll make any noticeable difference to the relative cleanliness of that trunk,” Ford says, leaning forward over the steering wheel to peer out the windshield at the trees lining the road. Dipper looks out the passenger window himself, thinks he sees figures flicker past between the trees as they drive past. 

“What’re you planning to do with it when you get it back to the Shack?” he asks, watching as the trees flash by.

“With any luck, I should be able to determine just what the creature has done to the residents of Gravity Falls who’ve been affected,” Ford says. Dipper glances over, notices the needle on the speedometer edging up towards eighty as they fly around one of the road’s many curves. “And with that information, I hope to be able to develop a cure.”

“A cure? What do you think -”

“I don’t know.” The words seem to drag their way out of Ford like they’re anchored somewhere in his lungs. “But I intend to find out.”

...

Ford goes straight to the basement as soon as they arrive, carrying something that looks like a cross between a proton pack and a vacuum cleaner under one arm and striding like a man on a mission. Stan, slouched on the stool behind the register, watches the vending machine door slam behind Ford before turning to Dipper. “No luck with that...wendigo problem you two were nerding out about last night, huh?”

“It wasn’t an wendigo, it was aliens,” Dipper says, unable to look away from the flickering fluorescent glow that illuminates the brightly-coloured foil wrappings of the vending machine’s contents. 

“Ah,” Stan grunts, sounding uncomfortable. “Well, whatever it is, hope he fixes it fast. This place needs its real cashier back.” He grumbles, in an undertone he almost definitely doesn’t think Dipper can hear, “Bein’ on till again’s bringing back memories, sure, but I’m not so sure I want ’em.”

Dipper walks over to the vending machine, feeling a little like he’s walking up to the guillotine, and punches in the code to open the hidden door. “I’m gonna go see if I can help Great-uncle Ford,” he starts, and then pauses when the door doesn’t open. “Um, did anybody change the code on this thing?”

“Not that I know of, kid,” Grunkle Stan says. 

Dipper gives the vending machine door a tug, but it stays stubbornly stuck in place, like it’s - “Grunkle Stan, does this door lock from the inside?”

“If it does, only my nerd brother’d know about it,” Stan says, and then meets Dipper’s eyes. “Look, kid. Dipper. It ain’t anything against you.”

“Isn’t - Grunkle Stan, he just locked me out of my own investigation!”

Stan shifts uncomfortably on the small stool, scratching at his back with one arm. “Look, I might still not remember much about - about the end of last summer, but I know it got pretty bad for a while there.” He breaks eye contact, clasping both hands in front of him and looking down at them. “I know I never wanna see you kids in a situation like that ever again, and I don’t even remember the half of it.”

“I can handle myself!” Dipper argues. “I  _did_  handle myself -”

“I know that,” Stan says. “Hell, I’d be surprised if anyone in this town didn’t know that. Just -” His speech trails off into frustrated silence, before he finally says, “Just don’t go borrowin’ trouble.”

Dipper glares up at the glare of the afternoon sun across the glass face of the vending machine.

He still tries the code one more time before he gives up and heads for the attic, just in case.

...

Ford doesn’t come up for dinner.

He doesn’t come up for Resignation Street, either. When Soos finally suggests that maybe Dipper and Mabel should think about pyjamas, dawgs, and Stan shoos them both upstairs to brush their teeth, Ford still hasn’t emerged from the basement.

Dipper can’t sleep that night.

He lies wide awake, his eyes open, staring at the beams that stretch over his head on the way to the peak of the roof, listening to the sough of the wind through the branches and smelling the faint scent of pine and clear water on the cool night air that seeps through the open window. Sometimes, if he’s very still, he thinks he can hear the occasional faint hint of a crash or thump, but it’s impossible to tell from the attic whether the sound is coming from the basement or somewhere outside.

No matter how deep and slow he breathes or how many prime numbers he counts, sleep still seems to hover just out of Dipper’s grasp. When he does manage to snatch handfuls of oblivion, they’re full of green eyes peering at him from the dark line of trees surrounding the Shack, and he always wakes startled and disoriented and more tired than before. 

The room sinks slowly from blue dark into the silvery shadows of midnight, and then into the velvet-soft blackness of early morning.

Wendy comes in to work that morning, after pale lavender dawn has spilled across the sky and the whole family (minus Ford) have eaten their way through a foot-tall stack of Stancakes and Mabel has asked Dipper ten times or more whether he’s all right. She shows up exactly on time, for once, her thick red hair pulled back in a fat braid and a broad, genuine smile on her face.

“Hey, dude,” she says to Dipper, who’s just settling down by the register with his crossword puzzle and definitely not staring expectantly at the vending machine. “What’s up? Soos in yet?”

“He’s just suiting up, he should be right -” Dipper looks up from his crossword puzzle (which he was definitely looking at, and not the vending machine, by the way), and his words shrivel and die in his throat.

Wendy looks back at him with acid green eyes, her smile slowly fading into confusion. “Dipper? You planning to, I dunno, finish that sentence?”

“You,” Dipper croaks. He swallows, hard. It drags down his throat, suddenly dry, like sandpaper. “You’re - you’re one of them.”

Wendy blinks. And then she smiles.

“Yeesh, dude, chill out,” she says, walking over to drop her bag on the counter beside the register and vaulting over it herself. “You sound like you’re in some kinda cheesy B-rated alien invasion movie.”

“Because I kind of am!” Dipper protests. Wendy leans down, rummaging under the counter, and straightens up with her name badge in one hand, carefully pinning it to the front of her flannel shirt. She lets out a long sigh, leaning her chin in one hand as she stares at Dipper. 

“Dipper, seriously, stop freaking out. The hive’s not gonna hurt you.” Wendy glances upwards, towards the ceiling. “Where’s Mabel, anyway? I’ll show you guys -”

“You’re not touching my sister,” Dipper blurts, before he can think that it might be a bad idea to challenge Wendy, before he can think at all. It just feels like a volcano erupted in his chest at the same time as someone dumped a bucket of ice water over him, and he doesn’t know what to do with the resulting reaction. He reaches out and grabs the broom that Soos keeps asking Wendy to put away instead of just leaning behind the register, nearly smacking Wendy in the head as he pulls it free. “Get out of my house.”

Wendy’s brow furrows in apparent exasperation. “O _kay_. Well, in case you’re having, like, a Stan moment - I  _do_  still work here.”

“I don’t care,” Dipper says. His heart is jackhammering in his chest, and everything feels strangely light and far too heavy all at the same time. 

“And Soos is a lot nicer than Stan ever was, but I don’t think even he’d be thrilled if I just don’t show up for work two days in a row,” Wendy says, still in that calm, totally reasonable tone of voice, like Dipper’s the one who’s acting weird here. 

“Just get  _out_ ,” Dipper demands, brandishing the broom. The corners of his eyes feel threateningly hot, and he squeezes the broom handle in both hands until he’s pretty sure he’s in danger of giving himself splinters. “Get away from my family.”

Wendy just looks at him, that poisonous green stare blank and impassive.

“Fine,” she says, at last, just when Dipper’s starting to think that he’s actually going to have to fight her, trying to psych himself up for the fact that he’s almost certainly going to lose. “Okay, man. If it’s such a big deal to you then I’ll go.” She pushes herself to her feet, points a finger in Dipper’s direction. “But you’re covering my shift.”

“Fine,” Dipper agrees. Relief crashes over him, threatens to sweep him away. “Just - go.”

Wendy holds up both hands, palms out, like Dipper’s brandishing a gun instead of a broom. She gathers her bag back up, and turns and walks out the door.

Dipper runs over and slams the gift shop door behind her, shooting the deadbolt with shaking hands. He sags against it as soon as it’s locked, and rests there for a moment, just trying to catch his breath.

...

He tries the vending machine again.

It still won’t open.

...

Dipper runs into Stan before he finds Soos, still suiting up for the first of the morning’s tours. He’s pretty sure he just confused Stan with his incoherent babble, but he doesn’t have time to go back.

“We can’t open the Shack today,” Dipper yells, skidding around the corner into Soos’ room. Soos turns away from the mirror he’s using to straighten his bow tie, and Dipper can’t put into words the rush of relief that floods him at the sight of Soos’ familiar, warm brown eyes. “We can’t let anybody in - we have to lock down the Shack, it’s the only way.”

“What’s going on, dawg?” Soos asks, and Dipper babbles again, spilling out the story of the strange green eyes and the weird ways people have been acting and Ford and the alien and Wendy and -

“Okay, dood, I believe you,” Soos says, and his expression is so thankfully serious that Dipper believes he means it. “You should go tell Mabel about this, I think she was gonna go with her friends to the pool today -”

Dipper’s off before Soos finishes speaking.

He’s running out of steam, just a little, by the time he makes it up to the top of the attic stairs. The bedroom door is closed, and Dipper throws it open, ignoring the way it bangs against the far wall. “Mabel! We have to -”

He stops.

Mabel’s sprawled out across her bed, face-down. It’d almost look like she was just sleeping in, if it weren’t for the fact that Waddles isn’t curled up next to her, and the fact that she’s already dressed in a skirt and purple sweater, and the fact that she’d been at breakfast with the rest of them, and the fact that the one of her feet that’s not dangling off the side of the bed still has a shoe on it, and the fact that her face is in her pillow and Dipper can’t tell if her chest is moving.

He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t have enough air left in his lungs to scream.

“Dipper,” Ford says, sounding surprised, straightening up from where he was bent down removing Mabel’s other shoe. He smiles fondly down at her, reaching down to brush a lock of her long brown hair away from her face, and Dipper sees with a firework-burst of relief that her hair flutters in front of her open mouth in regular time with each breath.

Dipper drags in one huge breath of his own, lets it out, takes another. 

He wants to tell Ford all about Wendy, about how far the - whatever this alien creature’s doing - has spread, how much danger they’re all in, wants to ask about how Ford’s research has been going and what he’s learned and whether there’s any hope of saving Wendy and the rest of the town and themselves. But something holds him back. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, instead. 

“If you’re worried about your sister, don’t be. She’s perfectly fine,” Ford says, still not turning to face Dipper. “This exhaustion is completely natural and expected in the early stages.”

Dipper feels like his feet are growing slowly into the floor. It takes a gargantuan effort to take one slow, shuffling step backwards. “Early -  _what did you do to Mabel_?”

“Exactly what I said I meant to, my boy,” Ford says, like he’s talking about a particularly interesting extradimensional phenomenon he thinks would interest Dipper or about how he thinks he’s finally made all the necessary modifications to the television set to keep it from dropping the signal every single time it snows. 

Dipper manages another shuffled half-step backwards, and then can’t move any more. He can’t look away from Mabel, peacefully passed out across her bed, from her shoe discarded on the floor from when Ford had stood up. For that split second when Dipper had walked in, before he’d noticed everything that was wrong with the picture, it had almost looked like their great-uncle was tucking her in.

Ford finally looks up at Dipper, his smile broad and proud and innocent, his eyes blazing unnatural green. “I cured her,” he says, matter-of-fact, and then, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit. It might itch a little, though.”

Finally, finally, Dipper’s feet seem to dislodge from the floor. He turns to run, but a six-fingered hand wraps around his upper arm, pulling him up short. Dipper spins, lashing out with his free hand, but even though the punch connects with Ford’s chest, it barely seems to faze him. Ford just looks pleased and proud and a little wistful. “Did Stanley teach you how to throw a punch?” he asks, grabbing Dipper’s other wrist. His grip is like steel. “Looks like his style.”

“Let - let go of me!” Dipper yells, kicking frantically out. 

It doesn’t make any difference. A cloud of something silvery-green drifts down to settle around his head, something that stings the insides of his nostrils and burns the back of his throat when he takes a sharp breath in. Dipper coughs, trying to hold his breath, but the stinging only spreads. 

His limbs are all starting to turn to water. From what seems like an impossible distance, he thinks he hears Ford say, kindly, “Don’t worry. Everything will look better when you wake up.”

Then everything goes black.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [seiya](seiya234.tumblr.com) and [dubs](dubsdeedubs.tumblr.com) for being beta readers/guinea pigs! Any missteps or mistakes still left are all mine.
> 
> Suggested listening for this chapter: "Spread Your Love" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

When Mabel wakes up, Dipper is gone.

That's the first thought she has, and it's the one that sticks, even after she wakes all the way up. There’s this - hollow placewhere he ought to be, like the hole left behind by a lost tooth, wrong and weird and empty. It takes her only a moment to realise that if there’s a hole, then there must be something to make a hole  _in._

She looks up, pushing herself up out of bed, and her Grunkle Ford meets her smile with one of his own.

“Good morning!” he says. “Welcome to the hive.”

It's hard to describe what it feels like, even to herself. She finally settles on 'an enormous group hug for the brain'. It’s close, but it doesn’t totally cover it. How's she supposed to describe feeling like she's...multiplied, somehow, lots and lots of Mabels repeating over and over like when she stands in between two mirrors and watches her reflections curving away into infinity? It’s enough to make her dizzy, but the hug is there to gather her up, hold her steady, set her back on her feet, safe and sound and all bundled up in warmth. 

Somehow she knows, from the top of her head down to her littlest toe, that it would never hurt her. That it never could.

Feeling a little bolder, she dives further in. 

...

_There’s sun on the top of the cliffs, shining in the waving grass._

_The arcade is dark and overheated, the electronic music and sound effects that fill the cavernous space almost deafening._

__Everything is dark and smells of exhaust and mothballs, and the hard leather seat she’s lying on bounces and jolts as she speeds along._    
_

_The pool is warm in the summer sun, but it’s still cool in comparison to the scorching air._

_Under the earth, surrounded by concrete and steel, the air is cold and damp and still._

...

Mabel surfaces, with a huge deep breath, like she’s coming up from underwater. Grunkle Ford is there, like an anchor, radiating calm and confidence, and she flops forward to wrap her arms around his waist before she realises he’s not actually sitting on the edge of her bed anymore. She’s alone in the attic. 

Mabel sucks in another huge breath. If she concentrates, she can tell that the strength and reassurance she can feel is coming from down in the kitchen, can smell pancakes and hear the faint sizzle of a frying pan. If she really focuses, she can feel the weight of the pan in her hand, the flex of her arm as she flips the pancake.

She pulls herself together again, takes a moment to remember which limbs are hers and how they all work. Mabel trips over her own covers as she stumbles out of bed, catching herself with both arms outstretched and wobbling to a stand in the middle of the room. “Whoa! Haha, weird.”

The smell of pancakes grows stronger as she picks her way carefully down the stairs, feeling like she’s learning how to walk all over again. By the time she makes it to the bottom of the stairs, though, she’s steady on her feet again. And she’s  _starving_.

“Some of those flapjacks better be for me,” she says, as she skids through the kitchen door in her sock feet. Ford looks up, and smiles, and it’s like standing in a sunbeam. Mabel can’t help but smile back. Not that she wouldn’t have anyway, or anything, but - it’s just all so strange and new and good -

\- and there’s still a hole in the middle of it where Dipper should be.

Ford’s smile fades in time with Mabel’s plummeting mood, and he holds out an arm, beckoning her over for a one-armed hug even as he deftly flips the pancake in the pan onto the growing stack beside him with his other hand. “They’re all for you, I’m sure you’re ravenous,” he says, putting the frying pan back on the stove and one-handedly ladling batter into it as Mabel presses her face against his side and wraps both arms around his waist. He’s taken off his overcoat, and the wool of his sweater scratches at her nose, but it smells nice, warm and homey and soft and just a little bit sheep-y. “We’ll find you something with some protein once you’ve got a few pancakes in you to keep your energy up. It’s a big change your body’s going through, it needs fuel. And rest. I noticed you took another nap.” He beams down at Mabel, but there’s a little corkscrew of worry in the warmth that wraps around her.

“Is Dipper -” Mabel starts, and this time she can feel it, like the drop at the very top of a roller coaster yanking her stomach out from under her, and she squeezes Grunkle Ford around the waist as tight as she can. “What’s wrong? Did something happen to Dipper? Is - where’s Grunkle Stan? What’s going on?”

Ford doesn’t answer for a long moment, his expression just getting darker and darker, until Mabel feels less like she’s hugging him and more like she’s clinging to his waist for dear life to keep from falling into the chasm that’s opening up under her.

“I attempted to bring your brother into the hive as well, but was...interrupted,” Ford says, finally, shortly. “I don’t know what’s happened to Dipper. My brother -” He bites the words off, giving Mabel a smile that would have been obviously fake even if she wasn’t feeling the anger and the creeping sadness coming off of him in waves. “Trust Stanley to choose the absolute worst time to suddenly decide to become stubbornly independent.”

“I thought you and Grunkle Stan weren’t fighting anymore,” Mabel mumbles into the fuzz of Ford’s sweater, and he gives her a soft pat on the back, the anger wearing slowly away. Mabel’s glad. She could’ve happily lived her whole entire life without ever feeling like she wanted to punch Grunkle Stan as hard as she could. Well. Except for that time when he’d let Waddles get stolen by a - “Wait. Where’s Waddles?” 

“Your pig?” Ford looks thoughtful for a moment, glancing up to look out the window. “I’m not certain. Animals don’t tend to linger around us, I’ve noticed. Companion animals are no exception. Though if you can find the pig, I’m sure it would only take a little desensitization training to get him used to us as we are now.” He gives a half-laugh. “The greater difficulty might be making sure  _you_  don’t eat him.”

“ _Eat_ Waddles? No way!”

“Which is why we need to make sure to feed you up now, when you need it most,” Ford says triumphantly, flipping the pancake out of the frying pan and onto the stack. “These are done, go to town. I would have made you sausage or eggs, but the town’s running a little short on both."

“That’s okay,” Mabel says, ducking around Ford to grab the platter of pancakes. The smell hits her in the face, hot and sweet and delicious, and her stomach does an entire backflip inside her, letting out a growl that could’ve come from the Multibear. “Um. Or maybe not. I’ll work on these and let you know.”

“Eat as much as you want, and if you're still hungry once you’re done with those, we’ll take you hunting,” Ford says, scooping up the empty bowl of pancake batter and the frying pan and carrying them both over to the sink.

Mabel’s got half the first pancake crammed into her mouth before he’s even finished his sentence.

...

When Dipper wakes up, Mabel is gone.

It takes him a moment to work his way out of the sticky cobwebs of sleep, to work out that the stink of leather and decades-old sweat and cigarette smoke and mothballs and engine grease is real, that the rough weave of the blanket that he’s curled up in and the cold leather of the seat he’s lying on are real, that the light streaming in the yellowed back window and catching in the dust hanging in the air is real, that the rattle and roar of the engine and the jolts and bumps of the road underneath him are real. It all seems very warm and hazy and distant, the thin, scratchy blanket somehow the best covers he’s ever slept under, the bench seat he’s lying on, so overstuffed that it’s like lying on a particularly slippery rock, the most comfortable bed. He could fall right back asleep like this, in this quiet, warm backseat -

“Kid? You still awake back there?”

“Mhmmhmnh,” Dipper manages. It’s better than he expected from himself. Mabel’s absence nags at him like a toothache.

( _how exactly does he know Mabel’s missing, again?_ )

“Don’t go back to sleep,” Stan says, from the front seat, and his voice is serious enough that Dipper actually listens, even though the only thing he wants to do is press his cheek back against the cool leather and shut his eyes and drift. “We’re gettin’ outta here, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine if you just keep your eyes open.”

“Um, no offense, Mr. Pines, but how do you know that?” Soos asks, in what’s clearly meant to be a quiet voice, and Stan makes a little frustrated noise in the back of his throat.

“It’s gonna be fine, Soos. We got to him in time. Okay?” The words sound reassuring, but Stan’s tone is almost a threat. 

“Okay, Mr. Pines, but I’m just saying, we don’t really know how this thing works, and his one eye looks kind of -”

“We got to him in  _time_ , Soos,” Stan growls, in a tone of voice that brooks no further argument.

There’s this horrible yawning empty feeling just under Dipper’s ribcage, like his insides have all been scooped out and his spine left to flap in the open air. Mabel’s absence is like a lost tooth or a broken bone, like a missing stair on a darkened staircase. Dipper can’t stop mentally prodding at it, like she’s going to suddenly appear out of thin air if he thinks long and hard enough. But all there is is emptiness, is absence, is the widening hollow between his ribs.

From where he’s lying, Dipper can see just a sliver of Soos’ ear and the back of Soos’ neck around the back of the passenger seat. If he sat up, Dipper could reach out and put a hand on Soos’ shoulder. 

It doesn’t make him feel any less impossibly, hopelessly isolated. Even stranded on a desert island - on a desert  _planet_  - he doesn’t think he could feel any more crushingly alone.

Dipper takes a deep breath, trying to quiet the rising fluttery shivers of panic tapping at the inside of his ribcage. The back of his nose stings as he inhales a lungful of dust, a pale echo of the way the silver-green dust had burned. Dipper sneezes so hard he thinks the top of his head’s going to be blasted off.

Soos glances back over his shoulder at Dipper, with his familiar goofy grin. It should be comforting, but somehow it only makes the hollow in Dipper ache. “Hah, guess you’re right, Mr. Pines. Only Dipper and kittens have sneezes that adorable.”

“Thanks,” Dipper grumbles, pushing himself up to sit upright in the backseat. His sneeze has stirred up all kinds of dust and dirt down under Stan’s seat, and his nose and throat are still sensitive, still stinging.

Stan’s eyes flick up to meet Dipper’s in the rearview mirror, and just as quickly look away, fixing back onto the road. Dipper sucks in another deep breath, coughing as he gets another mouthful of dust, and looks out the window instead of trying to interpret the expression on Stan’s face.

Trees fly by them, packed thick along the winding roadside, dark green branches meshing together like jagged teeth. Through a break in the woods, Dipper can see down into the valley, see the enormous cloud-shadows drift lazily over the town below. They’re climbing the cliffs.

They’re  _leaving_.

“Stop!” Dipper yells, and Stan slams on the brakes so hard and fast that they let out an unearthly scream and the back end of the Stanleymobile fishtails wildly in the gravel. Both Stan and Soos whip around to stare at Dipper, who tries very hard not to see fear in the way they’re looking at him.

“Mabel,” he manages, and sees Soos heave a sigh, sees Stan’s shoulders slump. “We can’t leave her -”

“Kid,” Stan says, and his voice is heavy, a block of concrete sinking slowly towards the riverbed. “I barely got us outta there. Your sister was -” He clears his throat, as though that will erase the crack in his voice. "Even if we turned around right now, by the time we got back, Mabel'd already be -"

“No -”

Dipper and Stan both stop, eyes locked. Stan looks away first, clearing his throat into his hand like Robbie backing out of some talked-up feat of bravery.

"We gotta keep moving," he says, but the bite has gone out of his voice. He turns his back on Dipper and yanks the key in the ignition with more force than strictly necessary, growling under his breath when the engine sputters and whines.

...

When a larger-than-usual pothole jolts him awake, it takes Dipper a moment to realise he'd even been asleep. He has no idea how long he's been out - the light's a little lower, a little rosier, but Soos is still nervously fidgeting and looking out the passenger-side window, Stan's still gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles and staring grimly at the road ahead, the trees are still flying darkly by them on both sides as they speed towards -

"Stop!" Dipper yells, for the second time this car ride. He almost expects to be ignored, this time, but Stan slams on the brakes just as fast as he had the first time, the Stanleymobile squealing to a halt in a cloud of choking dust.

Stan spins to look over his shoulder at Dipper, and Dipper sees his expression slip for a moment before hardening. "This better not be about Mabel again."

"We can't go this way," Dipper babbles. "There's a roadblock - we can't get out of town."

“Crashed my fair share of roadblocks in the day, kid,” Stan says, turning back to the wheel.

“Not like this one!” Dipper yells, seized by a sudden, frantic frustration. Why can’t Stan just  _listen_? How can he not see how bad an idea this is? How can he not tell how serious Dipper is? How does he not just  _know_?

“Dood, how do you even know that?” Soos asks, and the waver in his voice pulls Dipper up short.

“I - I don’t know.”

Stan glances up at Dipper in the rearview mirror again, a quick, darting look that’s almost unreadable. “Soos, keep Dipper talking. Don’t let him fall asleep again, got it?”

Soos looks at Stan like he might protest, or possibly throw up, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns around so he can meet Dipper’s eyes with only the barest of flinches, shoots Dipper a huge smile and raises a hand in a short wave. “You heard Mr. Pines, dood. I’m now the Dipper-Doesn’t-Sleep Patrol.” He falls silent, his big smile slowly fading. “Sooo....” he starts, and then, finally, just when Dipper is starting to worry the silence is going to go on forever, “Didja get the new Monstermon game?”

“Not yet,” Dipper sighs, aware he’s talking too fast and too loud but unable to wind down. “I was gonna pick it up before we got on the bus, but then Mabel had a syrup emergency.”

“Oh, dawg, I so get that,” Soos says. “For something that tastes so good on almost everything, there sure are a lot of ways syrup can go horribly wrong.”

“Just about - Soos, hate to break it to you, but syrup is a breakfast-only condiment.”

“That’s what the unenlightened want you to think,” Soos says, solemnly.

It sounds like he says something more, but his voice is drowned out in the crunch of gravel and squeal of the tires as Stan throws the Stanleymobile back into gear and starts to U-turn across the narrow road, nearly slamming into a tree before he reverses and peels out.

The farther they get from the roadblock Dipper’s somehow sure is behind them, the more the hollow in his chest aches.

...

Wendy turns up just as Ford is finishing his mug of coffee (black, with so much sugar the spoon can almost stand up in it; Mabel approves) and Mabel’s licking the last of the syrup off of her plate. The pancakes vanished like popcorn, but Mabel’s stomach is still twisting and churning, demanding something more substantial.

She recognises Wendy coming up the walk, sun warm on her back, the cozy contentment that Mabel’s starting to recognise as the hive in the back of her head decorated with boredom, a little good-natured resentment - at having to come in to work, probably - and a sick sunburst of worry. The worry seems to swirl around the emptiness where Dipper ought to be, like the plastic dinosaurs in a pitcher of Mabel Juice while it’s being stirred.

Wendy walks in without knocking - it’s not like she needs to anymore, anyway. “I’d apologise for being late, but it doesn’t look like the Shack’s even open,” she says, leaning against the kitchen doorframe. “What happened to Soos? And Stan? Are they -” She presses the palms of both hands together, mimes using them as a pillow.

“I wish,” Mabel sighs. “I dunno know what happened, but Grunkle Ford said -”

“Stanley made it clear that he doesn’t want any part of the hive,” Ford says, shortly. “And he took Dipper with him.”

“So  _that’s_  why,” Wendy says, and Mabel knows they all know she’s talking about the black hole where Dipper should be. “Is there anything we can -”

“There’s no need to worry,” Ford says, and Mabel feels a wind off the mountains ruffling her hair, patience and anticipation, the smell of pine. “They won’t make it out of town.”

Wendy nods. Her expression’s distant for a moment, and Mabel knows she’s there, too, waiting in the woods and watching the road for the familiar nose of the old red El Diablo. “Okay,” she says, and that sunburst of worry Mabel’s been feeling eases a little. “So I’m guessing I’m off the hook for today, huh? Unless you’re feeling like trying on the Mr. Mystery hat?”

Ford laughs, sounding surprised. “No. I don’t believe that’s a role I could satisfactorily fill. Deliberately spreading misinformation about anomalies? I wouldn’t make it past the first exhibit.”

“I’ll do it!” Mabel volunteers, but her stomach interrupts, with a huge, roaring gurgle that she’s amazed to hear coming out of her own body. “Uh, can we have lunch early?”

“Oh, man, is all you’ve had to eat since you woke up pancakes?” Wendy asks, sounding like she’s just heard that somebody’s never seen Dream Boy High. “Okay, kiddo, we’re taking  _you_  hunting.”

“Like, for adorable forest animals?” Mabel asks. She’s upset about it, sure, but not as upset about it as she thinks she would usually be. She’s  _really_  hungry. 

“Yup,” Wendy says, with a grin, patting the axe at her hip. “ _Delicious_  adorable forest animals. Trust me,” she says, clearly noticing that Mabel’s still a little uneasy, “it’s waaayyy easier than punching unicorns. Cute fluffy bunnies and squirrels? Usually don’t fight back.”

“Okaaayyyy,” Mabel says, drawing the word out. “Do they have to be cute and fluffy, though?”

“Eh, it kinda comes with the territory, but sure, whatever,” Wendy says. “Who knows, maybe we can find you an alligator. You coming, Dr. Pines?” she asks, turning to Ford, and he nods.

“Mabel, whenever you’re ready,” he says.

Mabel’s stomach answers for her, with another enormous growl. “All right, I guess we’re doing this,” she says. “Bring on the fluffy bunnies.”

...

It isn’t a bunny, as it turns out. It’s a kind of mangy-looking raccoon, frozen with its little black paws in the trash can and its little beady eyes wide open when Wendy slams the back door open.

“Oh, nice,” Wendy says. “Fast food.”

Then, before Mabel can say anything, her whole face splits open down the middle and unfolds with a sticky sound into four things that almost look like petals, all red and wet and lined with rows and rows of little sharp teeth. Something long and pink and snakey shoots out from the very centre, wraps around the raccoon as it tries to run away, and whips it back into the very centre of Wendy’s face, which snaps shut again.

She burps.

Mabel stares.

“ _Cool!_ ” she finally says, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Can I do that?”

Wendy gives her a lazy smile, crossing her arms over her chest. “You bet, squirt. Just shut your eyes and stick your tongue out as far as it’ll go.”

Mabel squeezes her eyes shut, sticks out her tongue. “Ith noth working.”

Ford chuckles. “No, you have to -” He stops, stroking his chin. “Hm. You know, I thought I’d seen the last of things that could be truly said to defy description when Stanley sent Bill packing, but -”

“Just get into my head when I do it this time,” Wendy suggests to Mabel.

Ford blinks. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“Eh, you’re still new,” Wendy says, nudging him in the arm with her elbow. “Okay, Mabel, ready?”

Mabel squeezes her eyes shut again, and looks out at the yard through Wendy’s. She’s pretty sure she’d get dizzy if she tried this with her own eyes open. She’s gonna need some practice.

“Fire away!” she says, with Wendy’s mouth, and feels her head bob as Wendy nods. They look up, and then Wendy shuts their eyes and -

“Oh, so  _that’s_  how you do it,” Mabel says, when she’s sure she’s using her own mouth to say it with. “Hey, I bet I can catch more birds than you!”

“You’re on, pipsqueak,” Wendy says, grabbing one of the poles holding the sagging porch roof up and swinging herself down onto the ground. Mabel charges down the stairs after her.

...

“When we get Dipper back, we gotta get Grunkle Stan too,” Mabel says. The trees are swaying gently overhead, their tops like sharp teeth taking a bite out of the pure blue sky. Okay, so maybe she’s got teeth on the brain. But she totally beat Wendy at that bird-catching competition (thanks, year of grappling hook practice!) and now she’s so full that all she wants to do is lie here with her head propped against a fallen log and watch the occasional cloud drift by overhead.

“Yeah?” Wendy says. She’s lying with her head beside Mabel’s, on the other side of the log. If Mabel concentrates and uses Wendy’s eyes too, she can see all the way around the clearing at once, which is super cool and also makes her feel a little dizzy. She wonders if she’ll be able to express this emotion in macaroni. Maybe she’ll have to bust out the big guns. She’s not sure she still has any modelling clay, though.

“Yeah. Grunkle Ford’s so sad about him running away,” Mabel says. “If we get Grunkle Stan to join the hive, then he’ll see how great it is and he’ll  _have_  to come back and he and Grunkle Ford will make up and hug and everything will be awesome!”

Wendy’s laugh fills Mabel with sunny ripples. “You’ve really got a plan, huh?”

“Dipper’s not the only one who can make plans,” Mabel says decisively.

“Gotcha,” Wendy says. “You just about ready to head back?”

Mabel hums in thought. “Just a little longer?”

“Sure thing, dude. This totally beats working cash,” Wendy sighs. Dimly, Mabel feels her folding her arms behind her head. “Though the literal apocalypse beat working cash, so I guess that’s not really saying much.”

Mabel giggles. 

“I’m gonna practice - what’d you call it? Putting myself in people’s heads?” she asks. Wendy gives an affirmative grunt. Everything coming from her is already going a little hazy, and Mabel thinks she might be starting to doze.

Mabel shuts her eyes and lets herself drift. 

This time, she has a little better idea of what she’s doing, where she’s going. She walks herself all around town, from head to head. It makes her a little dizzy, jumping straight from looking out of the diner windows to looking down from the lifeguard’s chair to searching through the woods to watching down the road out of town to gazing out of a car window as it bumps away down that road -

Mabel’s gasp as she sits bolt upright startles Wendy awake. “Whuh? Where’s the fire?”

Mabel spins around to grab Wendy’s shoulders, shaking her the rest of the way awake. “I found him! He was there!”

“Who was where what?”

“ _Dipper!”_

That gets Wendy’s attention. She spins around, sitting up so she faces Mabel. “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously seriously! It was just for a second but he was  _there_! I could see what he was seeing, I could feel -” Mabel presses a hand against the front of her sweater, right at the centre of the appliqué rainbow. “He’s so  _lonely_.”

“Oh man. We gotta get him back,” Wendy says, bringing a hand up to brush her hair out of her face and back behind her ear. “Wait. Mabel, you said you could see what he was seeing?”

“Yeah!” Mabel starts, excited for a moment, then, realising, “But it was just trees.” 

Wendy bites her lower lip. “But you know where you were looking last.”

“Hey, yeah!” Mabel shuts one eye. It doesn’t really help, but it makes her look like she’s thinking really hard. “They were a little bit, uh, east? East of the roadblock on the cliff.”

“So they’ll be there any minute now.” Wendy shrugs. She leans back down on her elbow, turning back over onto her back. “We’ll catch them at the roadblock.”

“I dunno,” Mabel says. There’s something about Wendy’s nonchalance that makes her uneasy, and Wendy pushes herself back up to sit up, sighing as she climbs to her feet.

“I think we oughtta head back now.” She reaches out, casually, slings an arm around Mabel’s shoulders and tugs her in to bump against her hip. Mabel’s almost smothered by a wave of - the only word for it is  _chill_. “Hey. Chin up. It’s gonna be fine.”

“Yeahhhhh,” Mabel says, and hops over the log they’d been resting against, lets Wendy guide her back towards the path they took to get here.

She can’t figure out why it’s still bugging her until she remembers that, during the split second she’d been in the car with Dipper, she’d been able to feel the roadblock getting farther away.

...

Soos is explaining the new game mechanics that've been added for Monstermon Mars and Venus when they pass the turning for town. Dipper's surprised when they keep driving, past the turning. "Wait, doesn't the road end here?"

Stan grunts from the driver's seat. "Old logging road, kid. Trust me, I know every possible way out of this sh- town. Never know when you're gonna need to make a quick getaway."

Dipper stares out the window as the corner vanishes behind a curtain of trees. His insides ache.

"Soos," he says, and Soos perks up.

"Yeah, dawg?"

"How's - how's Melody doing?"

Soos beams, even his voice lighting up. "Oh dood, Melody's the  _best_. She's been sending me all these chapsnats from Portland and it looks like she's having a blast down there. Her puns are so solid, dood. And the pictures she's been sending me of her sister's new baby? He's just the cutest. He looks like a little wrinkled jellybean."

Dipper can't help but grin at that. "Sounds pretty cute."

"Seriously, that baby's some kinda genius," Soos says, with the utmost seriousness. "Melody says he's already learning how to touch his toes.  _I_  can't even do that, dawg."

Dipper laughs. It makes the empty place in his chest hurt.

Soos keeps talking, but Dipper can’t seem to focus on the words. The emptiness fills his chest with a constant, distracting throb. It’s so quiet in his head.

He’s never in his life felt so alone. Not any time in elementary school when he’d sat down for lunch beside Mabel and all her friends had got up and left, not when their parents had first put them on a bus for Gravity Falls and they’d waved until they were out of sight, not even during the Oddpocalypse when he’d lost track of everyone and his only connection to Mabel had been a walkie-talkie he hadn’t even been sure she’d been able to hear him through - though that had come close. And hearing Soos talk about Melody and how much he misses her - it’d been a good idea to get Soos talking, but it just makes Dipper feel more alone. 

He and Mabel have never really been  _without_  each other, Dipper realises. Even when things looked bad, even when they were separated, Dipper’s always known he had Mabel. And Mabel’s always had him.

If he’s feeling like this, how must she be feeling right now?

It’s a little easier for Mabel, Dipper realises, slowly; she’s got Ford and Wendy and everyone else in that comforting warmth in the back of her mind. But there’s still a gap where he ought to be, just like the hole in him where she and the others ought to be, and it sucks away her attention and nags and worries at her just like it does at him and it leaves them both feeling hollow -

“Dipper?”

Dipper looks up. Soos is twisted around the seat to stare at him, concern and confusion mingled on his face. “You okay, dawg? You kinda spaced out for a minute there.”

“No, I’m not okay, Soos,” Dipper says, through clenched teeth. “You took me away from my sister.”

“Dood, Mr. Pines was telling the truth,” Soos says, defensively, and Dipper could just spit in his eye. “Mabel was way too far gone, we couldn’t wake her up -”

“I don’t care about your excuses! You  _both_  took me away from my hive before I could get properly bonded and now they’re all  _hurting_  - Mabel’s -”

It slips away like a rush of blood from his head from standing too fast, the town and Mabel and the comforting, contented presence at the back of Dipper’s thoughts all bleeding away all at once, leaving him staring at Soos’ frozen expression and feeling like he’d just been thrown with no warning into Lake Gravity Falls.

“Did I just -” he starts, and falters, his mind helpfully reeling back over everything he’d just said and thought and felt. It doesn’t seem quite real, now, like it was someone else speaking with his mouth, someone else moving the gears in his brain, someone else wearing his skin and moving him around like a puppet - “Oh, no. Ohhhh no no no no.”

“Dood, your one eye is...like, really green now,” Soos says, uncertainly.

“ _Not helping, Soos!”_

“Head between your knees, kid,” Stan says, without looking around, gruff and matter-of-fact as always, and Dipper grabs onto the sound of his voice like a life preserver. “Deep breaths. Panicking ain’t gonna help either.”

Dipper shoots a glare at the back of Stan’s head, but he sucks in a long breath. Then another. And another.

The back of his throat still stings.

“You gotta let me out,” he says, too fast. The floating dust motes that fill the backseat and the constant jolting over the rutted remnants of the road are making his vision blur. “You should - you have to leave me behind.”

“No way, dood. Pterodactyl bros ‘til the end!” Soos hoots, and Dipper shakes his head, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“Do you remember being a zombie, Soos?”

Soos is very quiet, after that.

“Kid, if I wasted any time rubbing Soos down with cinnamon and whatever else was in that weirdo gunk while he alternated between trying to eat my brains and making weird comments about his ‘fanfiction’, do you really think I’d kick you out on the side of the road at the first little outburst?” Stan says, shortly, cranking the Stanleymobile’s wheel hard to the left. The El Diablo groans in protest, but it thumps over the pitted road just the same, setting all of Dipper’s bones rattling. “Besides, that was nothing. You shoulda heard Ford go on when we busted you outta there. Hive this, community that, we were making the biggest mistake of our lives, yadda yadda. Told ‘im he should just marry it if he loves it that much.” He cracks a grin, finally, looking up to catch Dipper’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Then again, legally he’s still married to Goldie, so dunno how that’d work.”

Despite himself, Dipper manages a small, weak smile of his own.

“There ya go,” Stan says, his own smile softening a little. “We’ll figure this out, kiddo. I - I know I ain’t exactly Ford, but - don’t go givin’ up on me just yet.”

...

“They should have been there by now,” Wendy complains. She’s got her head tipped back over the kitchen chair and her feet propped up on the table, balancing the chair on its two back legs. Mabel can feel the rush of blood to her head, the tension in her back as she tries to keep her balance. It’s really, really true what she said back in the museum basement - she’s stressed out and tense, like, all the time. Mabel hadn’t really got it until she got underneath Wendy’s skin. If it weren’t for the hive, maybe she never would’ve. And if it weren’t for the hive, Wendy’d still be worrying about what everybody thought of her, instead of knowing for sure how cool they all think she is and how much they like her. Mabel can’t  _stand_ knowing Dipper and Grunkle Stan are missing out on this.

“Yeah, but we haven’t even  _seen_  anything!” she says. “We have to go and find them.”

Ford hums thoughtfully. He’s leaning against the counter watching coffee slowly drip into the coffeepot. Mabel can’t imagine anything more boring, but she also gets the gentle ripples of calm coming off him every time the coffee drips and thinks that maybe sometimes boring could be all right. 

“There’s really no need,” Ford says, after a moment’s silence, collecting his thoughts. “Dipper may not have been fully assimilated, but he’s been seeded. He won’t stay away for too long. This must be hurting him as badly as it hurts us.”

“That’s  _why_  we gotta find them!” Mabel protests. “Are we really just gonna sit around here while Dipper -”

She stops. Wendy flips her head back up over the chair, dropping down to plant all four chair legs firmly on the floor, and Ford looks away from the coffee drip, up at Mabel. 

“I don’t know if you guys felt it,” she says, suddenly uncertain. 

Wendy shakes her head. “Nah, dude, when you said you’d found Dipper I was totally surprised. I believe you! I just didn’t get anything from him, like, at all.”

“I wonder,” Ford says, still looking at Mabel, “whether it has anything to do with the fact that you’re twins.”

“Noooo,” Mabel says. “Maybe? I dunno, the only ‘twin’ thing we really have is when our allergies act up at the same time.”

“There you go. Special twin bond,” Wendy says, with a lazy smile, and Mabel smiles back. “So, what? Did you feel Dipper sneeze?”

Mabel shook her head. “We just have a Dipper-shaped hole in the hive. Dipper - he doesn’t have  _anybody_. He’s all alone out there.”

“Wait, you mean -” Wendy starts, and Ford’s face falls, realisation clearly sinking in.

“He can’t even connect to the queen?”

“Like I said,” Mabel says. “We gotta find them.”

Ford’s face darkens, and Mabel feels her hands ball into fists. “When I see Stanley -” he starts, and then bites off the rest of his own sentence, shaking his head. “Of all the reckless, irresponsible,  _selfish_ stunts he’s pulled, this really takes the cake.”

The last word isn't quite out of his mouth yet when Mabel hears the knock. It’s a quick, heavy pounding on the front door, and, unlike Wendy’s earlier unannounced appearance, it takes her - and everyone else in the room - totally by surprise.

“That could be them!” Mabel gasps, slamming both palms down flat on the table in front of her and pushing herself up out of her seat. “Maybe that’s why they didn’t get to the roadblock! Maybe Grunkle Stan figured out what was going on with Dipper and realised that he was being a big meanypants and brought him back -”

She’s off running, out of the kitchen and down the hall, before Ford and Wendy and their worry and disbelief can catch up with her.

When she throws the door open, though, it isn’t her twin on the other side, or her grunkle, or even Soos. Pacifica Northwest nearly slams her fist into Mabel’s nose, before she stops herself mid-knock, looking back over her shoulder and all around her instead of at Mabel, like she’s expecting something to pop out at her. She looks terrible - well, terrible for Pacifica, anyway, her hair’s a tangled mess and her eyes are big and frightened. “Mabel! Please, please tell me your brother or your weird genius relative is around, something’s  _wrong_  with everybody and my - my parents -”

She meets Mabel’s eyes, stops, and takes a step back.

“It’s okay, Pacifica,” Mabel says, and steps back herself, out of the doorway. She leans around the door, so she can still see the other girl, but so Pacifica could get by her. “Do you wanna come in?”

“ _No_ ,” Pacifica snaps, taking another step back before whirling halfway around to look behind her, like she’s scared she’s about to walk into something. “No, I don’t want - you’re just like them!”

Mabel reaches out, and finds two dark spots of worry moving through the trees towards them. Mabel doesn’t like to say she doesn’t  _like_  people - strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet! - but the Northwests...aren’t the first people she’d pick for hivemates. But there they are, and for an instant Mabel’s furious with Pacifica for running, for not listening, for not knowing what’s best for her -

“It’s okay,” she says, as Pacifica takes another step back and nearly trips down the stairs. She meets Pacifica’s wild eyes again and stomps down hard on the two angry spots in her head, tries to fill them up with hugs and rainbows instead. “You don’t have to be scared! We’re not gonna hurt you.”

“No, you’re just going to turn me into some kind of  _freak_  like you!” Pacifica moans. With one last look over her shoulder, she turns and starts down the stairs, only to freeze in place when the Northwests’ limo screeches around the turn and skids to a halt where the gravel of the parking lot starts to turn into the grass of the lawn. The back doors are thrown open, and Preston and Priscilla Northwest fly out, both bearing down on Pacifica as she shrinks back towards the porch.

“Pacifica! We were worried sick!” Pacifica’s mother starts, and Pacifica backs up the stairs, turning a pleading glance in Mabel’s direction. 

“Get back here right now, young lady, and accept your assimilation!” her father demands, and Mabel frowns at him. Pacifica’s already scared, there’s no way  _that’s_  going to help.

“Mabel,  _please_ ,” Pacifica starts, as her parents reach the foot of the steps. “Don’t let them -  _help_  me!” She starts towards the Shack door, but skids to a stop, shrinking back. Mabel doesn’t have to turn to know Ford’s come up behind her, Wendy following him with a hand rested on her axe.

Pacifica’s face falls faster than a pug doing a cannonball off a diving board. “They got all of you?” 

“You’re gonna be fine,” Mabel says, as Pacifica’s father gives a heavy, exasperated sigh and starts up the three porch steps. “Hey, you were scared about sharing at first, too, remember! This is just like...next-level sharing!”

Pacifica shakes her head, lunges forward and grabs Mabel’s shoulders. Mabel only manages to push away the shock that bursts from both Ford and Wendy, the instant, instinctive grab for weapons, when she realises that Pacifica isn’t hurting her, just staring desperately into her eyes. “Whoa! Haha, watch the sweater -”

“Is there even anything left of you in there?” Pacifica demands, shaking Mabel’s shoulders. “Mabel, you wouldn’t let them do this to me! You wouldn’t -”

Whatever she’d been about to say is cut off in a shriek as her father’s hand lands on her shoulder. The relief that floods over Mabel is almost enough to smother the uneasiness that Pacifica’s words filled her with.

“ _No!”_ Pacifica howls, as her mother grabs her other shoulder. Her fingers dig into Mabel’s arms as they pull her away, and Mabel reaches out almost unconsciously as Pacifica’s grip slips. “ _No no no no -”_

Her screaming turns sharp, high and wordless for a split second asher father leans over and blows a cloud of silver-green spores into her face. Pacifica’s shrieks peter out, slowly, dying into quiet whimpers and then into nothing as her head lolls, her eyes slipping shut as she collapses back into her mother’s arms.

“We’ll take it from here,” Preston Northwest says, cool and collected, with a nod in Mabel’s direction, and Priscilla beams an enormous smile as she lifts Pacifica up like Pacifica was just a sleeping baby, holding her close. Their relief and joy are light, like bubbles drifting up through the rosy contentment the hive lays over everything, but Mabel still feels something sick sitting in the pit of her stomach.

“Be nice to her when she wakes up, okay?” she blurts, and doesn’t know why. “You shouldn’t’ve done that. She was really scared.”

Pacifica’s father gives Mabel a blank look, and his confusion curls around behind her eyes. “We’re her parents. We decide what’s best for her. Would you rather we’d left her  _separate_?”

“Nooooo,” Mabel admits. 

Pacifica’s mother beams at the gathered Pines family again, but it’s not as sincere as the last time. Mabel watches them carry Pacifica down off the porch, watches as they all get back into the limo and slam the doors, as the long black car peels out of the parking lot, taking the unpleasant feeling of the Northwests in her head with it.

“I just think you could’ve been waaayyy nicer about it,” she mutters, to herself. 

When she turns around, both Ford and Wendy are giving her weird looks. Their concern falls over her like a blanket, and Mabel tries to shrug it off. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, that one kinda doesn’t work so well when we’re all connected to your emotions,” Wendy says, raising one eyebrow.

“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” Ford says, deep and serious. He’s still staring at the place where the limo had parked, and there’s something about the way he’s feeling that makes Mabel ask.

“That - that wasn’t anything like what happened with Dipper, was it?”

Ford doesn’t answer, but that chasm feels like it’s opening up under Mabel again.

“I could have been more reassuring,” he says, at last. “I was - worried. That I might lose my window of opportunity. That I might lose both of you.” He clears his throat. “Unfortunately, the fear proved founded.” 

Mabel looks down at her shoes, and then off to her right, towards the trees. She wonders where Waddles is now, whether he’d freak out and do that piggy scream he does if she tried to give him a hug.

Probably, she decides, with a sinking feeling.

Ford clears his throat again. “Luckily for Pacifica, she has no resentful relatives to spoil her assimilation. She’ll be fine. And once she wakes up, she’ll be as happy as you were to be part of our hive.” 

There’s something warm nudging at Mabel, and she glances up, without raising her head, to see her great-uncle with that apologetic smile he gets sometimes and both arms held open. Mabel trudges forward and lets him gather her up in a hug, lets his love and warmth wrap around her until the sick feeling in her stomach is so quiet she almost forgets it’s there.

...

 The Stanleymobile bumps along, over what’s starting to look less and less like an old, abandoned logging road and more and more like an old, abandoned hiking trail.

Nobody’s spoken for what feels like an hour.

Dipper keeps catching himself nodding off, his head bobbing heavily until another jolt startles him out of his doze. He’s starting to wonder if Stan isn’t aiming for the potholes in a bid to keep him awake. If he is, it’s failing. Dipper’s gonna be practically comatose in a couple more minutes, and he knows it.

Oh, and he’s  _starving_. And Dipper’s seen too many horror movies to write this off as a simple side-effect of having skipped lunch.

It takes him a little while to realise that he’s not dreaming, Stan really is humming a little tuneless ditty about ‘...drivin’ through the woods, away from certain doom, doo doodly doo...’. Dipper shakes his head, trying to clear away some of the thick fog that seems to have settled around his thoughts. Everything’s a little warm and dreamlike, and he’s probably micronapping every time he blinks. He knows he has to stay awake, but the knowing is pleasantly distant and easy to ignore. Honestly, he’s not even sure why. Isn't Mabel always getting on his case to get  _more_  sleep?

“You still awake back there, kid?” Stan rumbles, glancing up in the rearview mirror, meeting Dipper’s eyes. Dipper nods, and Stan gives him a look that, while not a smile, at least isn’t totally grim. “Shouldn’t be long now. This joins back up with a real road in about a mile, if my memory ain’t wrong.”

Dipper nods again, and leans back against the leather seat, gathering the rough blanket close around him. His stomach grumbles quietly to itself, and he can feel it turning over, slowly, gnawing at his insides. 

“Can we get some food when we stop?” he asks. The words come out a little mumbly, a little slurred, but at least they sound coherent. “I could eat an entire sack of hamburgers. No, wait - the whole cow.”

"Yeah, I could eat too, Mr. Pines," Soos agrees.

"Soos, how many times -"

"It's just too weird, dood!"

Stan sighs, before glancing back up at the rearview mirror and at Dipper. “Whatever. We’ll stop and getcha a burger somewhere.”

“Three burgers. No, wait, six,” Dipper corrects him, and scowls when Stan laughs. “I mean it.”

“Hittin’ that growth spurt already?” Stan teases, gently, and Dipper manages a sarcastic smile towards the rearview mirror before he leans his head back against the cool leather behind him, stares up at the greyish fuzz of the carpet covering the ceiling. Almost automatically, he reaches out to prod at the emptiness where Mabel ought to be, like maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time she'll be there, a warm and solid presence, all her energy and enthusiasm and -

Sadness.

Dipper blinks a few times, but the feeling doesn’t leave. There’s an indefinable but definite melancholy slowly bleeding from the severed end of the connection he ought to have with Mabel. He wishes he could be right there with her, wherever she is, right now, and give her the biggest of hugs. Whatever’s wrong, she needs to know she’s not alone. 

“We should go back and get Mabel,” Dipper says, and is a little surprised when neither Stan nor Soos says anything in response. “We really shouldn’t’ve left her behind in the first place.”

“How many times do I gotta tell you, kid,” Stan grumbles, and Soos puts a hand on his arm.

“Dipper. Dood. The freaky alien hive-mind thingy got Mabel, remember?”

“Yeah, I know,” Dipper says. “Still not sure why that meant we had to leave her. Like, I get that putting too much distance between you and the queen can cause problems, but if we’re only going for burgers -”

“Queen, huh?” Stan says, interrupting something Soos had been about to say. “What’s this ‘queen’ about?”

Dipper looks from Soos’ face, his eyebrows drawn together over his nose, to the back of Stan’s head. “Is something...wrong?” he starts, a slow suspicion starting to rustle in the back of his mind. 

“Nope. Nothin’ wrong with me. Whaddabout you, Soos?” Stan says, and Dipper narrows his eyes.

“Hah, totally normal, dood,” Soos agrees, but his smile is too big and the look he shoots in Dipper’s direction is too worried and his head is sweating too much. “One hundred per cent guaranteed normalino.”

“Okay, but you’re both acting weird,” Dipper says, pressing himself back against the leather of the backseat. His stomach chooses this moment to interject with an enormous growl, which everyone in the car ignores. “ _Everybody’s_  been acting weird,” Dipper adds, to himself, mostly. Without his notes and with the cloud of sleepiness still hovering around his head, he can’t quite remember exactly how they’d been weird, but he definitely remembers they had been. And he’d been worried. And so had - oh man, so had Ford. And these two have just taken him  _away_  from Ford, and Mabel, and the hive, and with every second that passes they’re taking him farther away from Gravity Falls -

Dipper squeezes his eyes shut, and reaches out, searching. Apart from the slow leak of sadness from Mabel, all he’s really getting is a low-level, constant hum of contentment from the rest of the hive, distant and a little detached, like it’s always been, like he’s somehow sure it shouldn’t be. He tries to bite down the wave of panic, of urgency, that demands he get out of this car  _now_ , get back to his hive and his family  _now now now_. He needs to keep his head clear, needs to think. He needs a plan. He needs - 

There’s a faint buzz against the backdrop up ahead, a little cluster of minds like a sun behind a grey sky. Dipper gets a feeling of physical strength and strain, exhilaration and adrenaline and, yep, testosterone. Well, it is an old  _logging_  road.

They don’t hear him at first ( _wrong wrong wrong_ ) but when they do, it only takes a taste of his panic to set them off running. For a moment, Dipper’s dizzy with the sense of being in two places at once as he bumps along in the backseat of the Stanleymobile and crashes through the underbrush at top speed all at once. 

Then the person whose mind Dipper’d been riding along in bursts out onto the road, Stan stomps on the brakes, and Dipper sees right through the Stanleymobile’s windshield, to Stan’s scowl and Soos’ nailbiting and Dipper’s own face, pale and shocked with both eyes wide, one brown, one poison green -

Dipper gasps as he slams back into himself like he’s been hit by a freight train, like he’s just dropped out of the mindscape back into his own body. The fog that had settled over him melts like cotton candy under rain, and he has his own mind back, silent and empty. 

He doesn’t have any time to be relieved or scared or much of anything, though, because Manly Dan Corduroy, standing in the road in front of them and glaring acid-green daggers from under a thicket of red eyebrow, reaches out and grabs the front bumper of the Stanleymobile with both hands. 

Then he starts to lift.

Soos lets out a whimper that reminds Dipper of their cat at home when Mabel scoops it up around the middle, and Stan gives a growl of frustration, jerking his foot off the brake and revving the engine as Dan heaves the front of the El Diablo off the ground. “Come on, come on,” Stan mutters, as the engine whines and whirrs, the wheels spinning uselessly against the loose debris of the forest floor. 

Dipper leans forward over Stan’s seat, watching in mute horror as more redheads spill out of the trees to circle the car. More than one of Wendy’s brothers have axes, and, just judging by the way Dan’s apparently trying to flip the Stanleymobile lengthwise, they’re no longer bound by the limitations of human strength either. (Or maybe that’s just Dan being Dan. That might just be Dan being Dan. Dipper’s wondered for a while whether there might not be some manotaur blood in that family.)

Dipper shuts his eyes. He called them here, there has to be some way he can get them to leave him and Stan and Soos alone. There has to be  _some_  silver lining to this hive stuff, doesn’t there? 

But there’s none of the quiet, peaceful hum in the back of his head now, just the hollowness he’d felt before, when he just woke up, and even reaching out to try to find Dan’s mind yields only more emptiness. Dipper mutters a word he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to use in public under his breath, and leans back against the back of the rapidly-tilting seat. If he could just get back in that same frame of mind, if he could just -

“Soos!” Stan yells, and Soos shakes his head.

“No way, Mr. Pines, that’s Wendy’s dad!”

“Soos, I ain’t asking!”

Soos’ lower lip juts out in something that would be called a pout if he were a little (okay, a lot) younger, but his eyes narrow with determination. He leans down, fishing under his own seat, and comes up with something that can only be one of the ten guns Stan’s always bragged about keeping in the Shack. It’s a rifle, and it must be loaded, based on how Soos immediately hefts it onto his shoulder before reaching over to crank down the Stanleymobile’s window by hand. 

“Just for the record, I don’t agree with this,” Soos says, half-turning in Dipper’s direction. Then he turns and aims out the window, straight at Manly Dan’s beanie. His hands - and the nose of the rifle - are shaking, but Dipper knows that doesn’t mean he won’t fire. Soos’ voice warbles slightly as he yells, too, but it’s thick with determination. “But if you wanna get at the Pines family, you gotta go through me!”

Dan shoots a glare at the rifle aimed in his direction, but he stops raising the front of the car. Dipper’s not sure if he imagines that Dan’s eyes flick in his direction. 

Then Dan’s face splits open straight down the middle and peels back in four almost petals of flesh lined with rows of sharp teeth, something long and pinkish whipping out of the dead centre to wrap around the rifle’s nose and rip it right out of Soos’ hands. It snaps back into the centre of what had, seconds ago, been Dan’s face, and the petals close over it, Dan’s face bulging strangely for an instant as it settles back into place.

Dipper can’t move. By the looks of things, neither can Stan or Soos. They all sit frozen, staring.

There’s a horrible crunching, grinding sound, and then Dan lets out an enormous burp.

Dipper claps both hands over his mouth as his stomach does a sickening empty churn. 

“Welp, that’s gonna haunt my nightmares,” Stan says matter-of-factly. “Soos, where’d we put the rest of the guns?”

“No way, dood! I’m not trying that again!”

“Come on,” Dipper mutters, to himself, pressing both hands against his eyes as he tries desperately to get back the feeling of his mind brushing up against Dan Corduroy’s. “Come on, come on...”

It’s not working. All he can do is keep picturing, over and over, the way Dan’s face had split, feel it like a phantom pain under his own skin.

There’s a creak of protesting metal, and Dipper looks up to see the door to his left pulled open. One of Wendy’s brothers, the one whose hair is perpetually in his eyes (Braedon? Brandon? Brendan? Something like that, Dipper can’t keep all of their wildly similar names straight in his head) smiles at him, holding out a hand. Dipper pulls away, scooting along the seat towards the other side of the car, only to hear the other door swing open behind him and feel a pair of hands land on his shoulders, pulling him backwards out of the car.

His strangled scream makes Stan whip around, fear written across his face as he yells, “Kid!”, but Dipper’s already being dragged out of the Stanleymobile. He scrabbles to hang onto the doorframe for a moment, but the grip holding him is inexorable. The doorframe warps with a metallic scream and Dipper shoots out of the car like a cork from a bottle, slamming into the hard and knobbly ground with a thump that knocks all the wind out of him.

Another of Wendy’s brothers, one of the littler ones, leans over to grin down at Dipper. “Don’t worry. We gotcha now, dude,” he says happily, and Dipper tries to crab-scuttle backwards on his elbows, trying to get away. “You’re gonna be okay.”

There’s something about the way the kid stands, something about the way he’s moving and the words and the tone he uses and the smile on his face. Even though it’s kind of crazy, Dipper can still remember looking through the windshield of the car and seeing his own face in the backseat when Manly Dan had charged out into the road. He takes a deep breath, and asks, “...Wendy?”

The kid smiles again, a lazy half-smirk that Dipper recognises too well, and winks. “Hi, Dip. Mabel says to send you a great big hug, but I told her she can hug you herself when we get you back to the Shack.”

“No!” Dipper blurts, pushing himself back on his butt. A stray twig or something scrapes along the bottom of his leg, and he freezes. The kid - Wendy-in-the-kid’s-body -  _whoever_  is staring at him like he’s just pulled out a hand grenade, and even Dan and the other boys pause in the middle of - whatever they’re doing to the car, it looks like they’re getting ready to throw it into the trees - to stare in Dipper’s direction as well.

“Dude, why not?” the kid whose body Wendy’s currently occupying asks, sounding hurt, and Dipper’s brain curls into a little hedgehog-ball inside his skull, refusing to think. “C’mon, man, I thought you were finally starting to be cool with the hive thing.”

“Oh, I - I definitely am,” Dipper says, darting a quick look at the car and at Soos’ face, at Stan who looks like he’d vaulted into the backseat, standing with an arm raised to punch the kid who stood between him and Dipper. “But, uh, Stan and Soos aren’t!” he babbles, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “I’m just trying to, uh, convince them?”

Wendy-in-her-brother’s-body shrugs. “It’s fine, dude, we can just assimilate them -”

“No!” Dipper shouts again. “No, I mean, uh...”

Everyone’s still staring at him, but Dipper has no more bright ideas. He’s out of ideas, out of options, out of time. 

“Sorry,” Dipper says, and launches himself to his feet. 

Wendy or the kid or whoever is in control of the body standing in front of Dipper doesn’t see the punch coming. Dipper’s fist collides with the side of their head, and they go down like a sack of bricks. Dipper doesn’t wait to see if they get up again, bolting for the car instead. He dodges around two of Wendy’s brothers, and throws himself under the raised front end of the car, sliding along the scrabbly gravel to tackle Manly Dan’s legs.

It’s gotta be the element of surprise that does it. Dan tries to kick Dipper off without dropping the car, overbalances, and topples backwards with a  _crash_  that Dipper’s pretty sure knocks over a few trees somewhere in the depths of the woods. Dipper scrambles to his feet, flinging himself onto the hood as Stan slams the back two doors and Soos scrambles over into the driver’s seat, ramming the gas pedal to the floor and swerving sharply to get around Dan. The Stanleymobile’s tires screech against the gravel for a moment before it shoots forward like a bullet from a gun, nearly plastering Dipper against the windshield. 

Behind them, Dipper can see Wendy’s brothers and her father picking themselves up, two of the boys starting to run after the car before falling back. He heaves a sigh, and falls back himself against the hood of the Stanleymobile, staring up at the sky as the tops of the trees flash by.

...

Mabel can tell the moment Wendy drops back into her own body, because she pulls in a deep, gasping breath and sits upright with a jerk. Mabel had dropped out of riding along in Wendy’s brother’s head after the guns had come out, but she hadn’t been able to just walk away while her brother and her grunkle and Soos were so  _close_.

“What happened?” she demands, as soon as Wendy’s eyes refocus. “Are they bringing Dipper back? What about Grunkle Stan and Soos?” Mabel swallows hard, and asks, “Is everybody okay?”

“Yeah, everybody’s fine,” Wendy grumbles. 

“You doesn’t sound nearly excited enough! What happened to Dipper?”

Wendy blows out a long breath over her top lip. “I don’t think he’s ready to come back just yet,” she says.

“Wh _aaaaaaaaat_?!”

“Yeah, the left hook to the face kinda gave it away.” Wendy rubs her jaw, like the injury came back into her own body with her. 

“Dipper  _punched_  you?”

“Hey, I’m tough, I can take it.” Wendy shrugs, but her discomfort and worry crawls under Mabel’s skin. “Just give him a little more time, Mabel. He’s coming around. It’s just taking him a while.”

“Yeah, but what -” Mabel’s nearly choking on both their worry. This is the bad part of the hive - when one person’s sad, everybody else can make them happy again, but if everybody in the room is sad... “What if they take him away and he never comes back again? What if he’s just all on his own forever? What if - what if  _I_  never see him again?” She pauses. “You at least gave him that hug I told you to give him, right?”

Wendy’s sudden attack of guilt tells Mabel everything she needs to know.

Mabel lets out a long, low moan as she slumps forward over the table. 

“I’m gonna need some orange juice to deal with this,” she says, into the wood grain.

“Heyyyy,” Wendy says, in that voice that’s trying to be comforting, but just makes Mabel feel that miserable hollow achey spot at the back of her mind even worse. “It’s gonna be fine. They can’t take Dipper away. We all felt him connect this time, it’s just a matter of time before it’s permanent.”

It takes a huge effort, but Mabel manages to lift her head enough to nod. “I guess -” she starts, but anything else she might’ve been saying or thinking falls right out of her head. Somewhere in the forest, somewhere close, there’s a group of their hivemates - Mabel hasn’t been paying much attention to them, because she’s been busy following the Dipper disaster, but she’s sure paying attention now.

Because one of them’s looking directly at Grenda as she draws a golf club back up over her shoulder to take a swing.

“Whoa whoa whoa, hang on,” Mabel says, reaching out and grabbing Wendy’s wrist even though she knows Wendy can feel the sudden pulse of excitement and interest, knows Wendy knows as well as she does about the group out in the woods. “That’s Candy and Grenda! What’re they doing out by Grunkle Ford’s bunker? How’d they even know about it, anyway?”

There’s a thump from somewhere in the hall, and Mabel’s grunkle pops his head around the doorframe. “We’ve found Fiddleford!” he says, breathlessly, pulling on his overcoat while he speaks like he’s an instant away from running straight out the door. “It looks like he took the last few holdouts to our old bunker - we might need backup, maybe I can reason with him -”

“I’m coming too,” Mabel declares, jumping down from her chair. “Candy and Grenda are there! It’s just not a hive without them. No offense or anything,” she adds, and Wendy rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling and she doesn’t feel upset.

Ford grins too, holding out an arm. “Then let’s go make sure we don’t have a repeat of what happened with Dipper.”

...

They pull up short for only long enough for Dipper to get back inside the car and for Stan to take over the wheel again. This means the car ride gets about 75% more terrifying, but Dipper can live with that. It’s not like his heart rate or adrenaline level can get much higher, anyway.

The silence is just starting to get uncomfortable when Soos says, “Okay, I’m just gonna say this ‘cause I know we’re all thinking it, doods. That thing Manly Dan did with his face? Kind of...kind of attractive. Yanno. In a...weird, horrifying-abomination-against-nature kind of way.”

“Yeah, yeah, Soos, we all know you’re a gigantic weirdo,” Stan says. “I’m more worried about how they knew where to find us.”

Dipper turns away. There’s a dead fly stuck by its wing in the rubber lining along the bottom of the window to his left, and every time the Stanleymobile bounces over a rut or a pothole or a root, it flaps pathetically against the glass.

“It was my fault,” he admits, finally, heavily. “I - I don’t know what I was thinking, you guys just said we weren’t going back for Mabel and I -” He bites the rest of the sentence down, swallows the excuses before he can make them. “I connected with them. I let them know where we were.”

There’s a rattle in the quiet rumble of the Stanleymobile’s engine that Dipper hadn’t heard before, and he hopes Dan hadn’t broken anything when he’d scooped the car up off the road. The trees that flash past are starting to thin, just a little, just enough that he thinks he can catch the occasional glimpse of a road beyond.

Stan heaves a sigh. It sounds tired, resigned. “It’s getting worse, huh?” His voice is surprisingly gentle, and Dipper, with a combination of shock and horror, feels his eyes start to sting.

“I - I didn’t want to - I didn’t mean -”

The Stanleymobile swerves sharply to the right, and then slams to a halt. Dipper wraps both arms around himself, curling his knees up close to his chest and staring at the pale gooseflesh that covers them. There’s a tightness in his chest that has nothing to do with the sucking hollow in the back of his mind, and he has to force himself to take deep breaths, not to sniffle. The front door opens, then slams closed, and footsteps crunch on the gravel outside.

The back door opens with a groan of protest, and a warm, heavy hand lands on Dipper’s shoulder. He doesn’t look up from his knees. This is how it’s going to end, with him dragged out of the car again and left on the side of the road, left behind all alone for whatever’s infected him to slowly overtake his mind and his body and erase anything that’s left of him and the worst part is that he’ll never even  _realise_  that anything is wrong, he’ll never be able to get Mabel out, they’ll just be trapped as happy, contented, mindless puppets for the rest of their miserable -

“Kid,” Stan’s voice says, deep and gruff, “look at me.”

Dipper doesn’t look up from his knees.

“Mr. Pines,” Soos says warningly, but Stan just repeats the command, a little softer this time.

“Hey. C’mon. Chin up, look at me.”

Dipper bites his lower lip, struggles to keep down a welling sob that threatens to tear out of his throat. Slowly, cautiously, he raises his head.

Stan give Dipper’s shoulder a squeeze. His expression is soft, sorrow or sympathy or something related to both, but his eyes are like steel. Stan meets Dipper’s gaze eye to eye, and doesn’t even flinch at the sight of the one iris Dipper knows is that telltale acidic green.

“I’m gonna fix this,” Stan says, without taking his eyes off of Dipper’s, his voice level and even, less like a promise and more like a statement of fact. “Okay?  _We’re_  gonna fix this. Because we’re the Pines, and apparently that’s what we do.”

Despite himself, Dipper can’t help the smallest of chuckles. It tries to transmute into a sob halfway through, and he presses the knuckles of his left hand against his mouth, trying to keep it in.

“Hey, hey,” Stan says, and the hand on Dipper’s shoulder pulls him forward, gathering him close against his great-uncle’s chest like he’s not a big grown-up thirteen-going-on-fourteen-year-old, but just a scared kid who needs to be comforted. “Hey, shhh. You’re all right. It’s gonna be all right.”

Dipper presses his face against his grunkle’s shirt and tries to take deep breaths, tries not to let the floodgates burst. Stan’s arms wrap around him, warm and strong, and he slowly realises he’s shaking. 

“It’s okay,” Stan mutters, giving Dipper a gentle but absent pat on the back. “No way I’m lettin’ some creepy mind-sucking monster have my two best niblings.”

“Grunkle Stan,” Dipper manages, and then has to stop and take a deep breath before he can say, “we’re your  _only_  niblings.”

“Yeah? Well, all the more reason not to let some creepy mind-sucking monster getcha.” Stan straightens up, but not so much that he has to pull away from Dipper. “Soos? We’re goin’ back.”

Dipper draws in another rattling breath, lets it out slowly.

“If you wanna take the car,” Stan goes on, “get outta here, go find that Melody -”

“No way, Mr. Pines,” Soos says gravely. “If you’re going back, then so’m I.”

“Great. Take the wheel,” Stan says. He straightens up a little further and climbs up into the backseat beside Dipper, shutting the door behind him. 

Dipper tries not to cling pathetically to his grunkle, but he’s aware it’s a losing battle. He’s still shaking, just a little, and just having another person close enough to touch makes the hollow in the back of his head retreat, just a little.

Soos hesitates, eyeing the steering wheel. “Are you sure, Mr. Pines? I mean, this car is like your baby -”

“You did just fine back there with the Corduroys. There ain’t anybody I’d trust more to get us back into town in one piece.”

Soos puffs up like a pigeon, a proud smile blooming across his face. “You got it, Mr. Pines!”

“You can turn right onto the road up ahead, there’s a turning that takes you into town a few miles from here,” Stan says, and Soos nods solemnly, clambering out the passenger side door.

“Okay, kid.” Stan looks down at Dipper, who’s still latched to his waist like a limpet, and puts an arm around Dipper’s shoulders. “You can’t go to pieces on me just yet, I need your brains if we’re gonna stop this thing and get both our twins back.”

Dipper swallows hard, throat scraping drily, and manages a nod. He lets go of Stan’s waist as Soos climbs back in the driver’s seat and kicks the engine into gear, feeling a little silly about clinging to Stan like he’s about to plummet off a cliff if he lets go. Stan lets Dipper pull back, but he doesn’t move the arm he’s draped across Dipper’s shoulders, and Dipper doesn’t try to shrug it off. “Okay. Let’s start with what we know.”

...

As it turns out, what they know isn’t all that much. Dipper wishes he had his notebook, but the backs of the old scratch tickets Stan dug out from under the seats, though disgusting, work well enough. 

“What I don’t get is how it started,” Dipper says, starting to gnaw on the pen he’d found in the ashtray and quickly realising his mistake. "Like, okay, we’ve got a quasi-hivemind that takes people into itself by infecting them with spores and gives them super-strength and freaky mouths straight out of  _The Thingy_  and the ability to borrow each other’s bodies, and it’s trying to assimilate everybody in town - but  _why_? Where did it come from? Who was the first person it took over? How did it get them?”

“Eh,” Stan says. “We can worry about that kinda stuff after we wipe it off the map. All I wanna know is how we kill it.”

“What  _I_  wanna know,” Soos says, glancing back over his shoulder, “is how it got Dr. Pines.”

Dipper and Stan both look up, and Soos shrugs, sheepishly.

“I just don’t get it, doods. You said it gets passed around by infected people making spores, which is super unsettling but makes sense, but Dipper  _also_  said he got knocked out as soon as Dr. Pines blew spores in his face. Right?”

“Yeah,” Dipper mutters.

“But Dr. Pines was in the basement, right, when he got infected. And Dipper said he walked in there and locked himself in. And that vending machine’s always locked, right? And only you guys know the code to get in, right? So, like, how would somebody have got down there to get at Dr. Pines?”

Dipper opens his mouth, then shuts it again, biting his lower lip as he turns the question over in his head.

“Soos,” he says, slowly, but picking up speed as he gets more excited, “I think you just found our missing piece.”

“I did?” Soos asks. “Great! Uh, where is it?”

“Great-uncle Ford found something when we were out looking for what we thought was a wendigo,” Dipper says, leaning over the small drift of scratch tickets that are taking the place of a corkboard and string. “He thought he could use it to make a cure. He took it down to the lab with him! That’s gotta be how he got infected!”

“So, wait, you’re thinkin’ it’s some kinda - what?” Stan asks. “This ‘queen’ thing you were talkin’ about?”

Dipper taps his pen against his bottom lip, then snatches it away before he can absentmindedly put it in his mouth again. “I think so! And if this hive works anything like a beehive, the queen would have to be sort of like its central brain. Maybe if we can kill it -”

He’s not quite sure what happens next, but there’s a slice of time missing and suddenly Stan’s shaking his shoulders, yelling his name. When Dipper blinks both eyes, trying to make sense of what just happened, Stan huffs out a wary sigh of relief, his vise-grip on Dipper’s shoulders loosening slightly. His tone is joking, but his voice is a little too tight and too sharp to be a joke when he says, “Think you’re gonna have to sit this one out, kiddo.”

“What? No! That thing’s still got Mabel -”

“And we’ll get her back,” Stan promises. “But - I don’t think this hive business is gonna let you even think about hurting that queen.”

Dipper opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it at the sight of Stan’s face. Instead, he asks, “What happened?”

“It was super scary, dawg!” Soos says from the front seat, over Stan’s stone-faced silence. “Your eyes, like, rolled back and then you just turned  _off._  Like somebody’d flipped a switch, dood! We couldn’t even tell if you were breathing!”

“Oh, man,” Dipper mutters under his breath, pressing the palms of both hands against his eyes.

“Oh man is right,” Stan agrees. “Look, why don’t you - why don’tcha take a nap? You’re still pretty wore out, right?”

“Actually, mostly I’m just hungry now. And I thought sleeping was gonna turn me into one of them?” Dipper starts, and then his brain catches up to his mouth. “Oh -  _oh_! Okay, yeah, I could try to get some sleep.”

He pulls the blanket back up over his legs, and goes to lie down on the back seat again. Just before he shuts his eyes, though, he adds, “But if I wake up with some kind of monster-mouth hidden behind my face, I’m blaming you guys.”

Stan barks out a laugh, and ruffles Dipper’s hair. “Go to sleep, kid.”

...

_\- like a dream, at first, like watching from underwater, on a television set that keeps dropping the signal, garbled images, feelings, snippets of sound -_

_\- panicked shouting and wordless yells cutting in and out like a video pausing every few seconds to load -_

_\- bright bursts of colour and motion against black -_

_\- the smell of pine and petrichor mixed with metal and engine grease -_

_\- furious frustrated anger, fear, helplessness -_

_\- the old man’s face falling slack, his eyes sinking closed over his long beard in a cloud of silvery green -_

_\- a wordless yell and a friend’s face twisted in anger as she raises a golf club to swing -_

...

Stan and Soos stop talking with suspicious speed when Dipper jerks awake with a gasp. They both stare as he sucks in a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. The car’s pulled to a halt outside the Shack, he notices, the quiet of the forest bleeding in through the window glass instead of the rumble and whine of the engine. Outside, the blue sky and the pines are almost eerily still. It’d be a beautiful day if it weren’t for everything. 

There’s an insidious tendril of comfort, of calm, threading through the back of his thoughts, and Dipper’s stomach churns.

“I think we’re - you’re the only ones left,” Dipper says, and Stan and Soos share a glance that Dipper can’t read. He hurries to add, “I  _think_  I just watched a swarm of - well, of  _us_  take down Mr. McGucket. And it looked like Candy and Grenda weren’t far behind.”

“ ‘Us’?” Stan asks, and Dipper shuts his eyes. 

“You know what I mean.” He hates himself for how small and pathetic his voice goes. “Don’t make me say it.”

“That reminds me, dood, what’re we supposed to call people who’re part of this...hive thingy?” Soos asks, from the front seat. “Like, is there a name for you guys?”

“Soos, what...” Dipper starts, and Soos shrugs, holding out his hands palms-up.

“Hey, serious question!” He starts ticking off names with his fingers. “ ‘The infected’ sounds like something out of a zombie game... Are you like...hosts, or something? Hang on, wait, I think that’s taken. Hmm. Coming up with a catchy monster name is harder than I thought, doods.”

Dipper presses a hand to his forehead, unable to resist a small smile despite himself. 

“Me, I like the sound of ‘history’,” Stan says, reaching over to swing the door open. “Dipper -”

Dipper lifts his head, manages a tight-lipped smile that’s closer to a grimace. The thread weaving itself through his thoughts tugs, just a little, and he pinches the inside of his arm.

“Sitting this one out, I know, I know.” 

Stan nods, once, with an expression that makes Dipper’s heart kick once, painfully, in his chest, and then turns to Soos. “Hey Soos, keep an eye on the kid for me, willya?”

“...’hiver’ just sounds kinda silly, and anything they use to talk about, like, bees just doesn’t sound all that intimidating.” Soos looks up just long enough to flash a huge smile in Stan’s direction. “Sure thing, Mr. Pines!”

The door slams behind Stan, and Soos turns to Dipper with that same smile. “You wanna help me out with this naming thing, dood?”

Dipper sighs. “Sure. Why not.”

After all, he might as well have some say in what he’s becoming.

...

Grunkle Ford finds Mabel where she sat down, her back against the fake tree that hides the bunker her friends had been trying to get into. Her cheek’s still throbbing where Grenda had hit her with the golf club, and she’s just grateful it hadn’t been Candy who hit her - the golf club probably would’ve exploded on contact. 

“I believe that’s everyone,” Ford says brightly, gently laying the sleeping figure of Old Man McGucket down against the tree beside Mabel. “Now only my twin and yours - and the new Mr. Mystery - are still unaccounted for, and with how well Dipper’s coming along, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time we see them he’s assimilated them himself.”

Mabel tugs her knees a little farther inside her sweater. “I guess,” she mumbles, into the soft wool of her collar. “I hope it’s soon.”

“You’re still upset about your friends,” Ford says, sympathetically, and Mabel looks down at her toes, giving them a wiggle.  The dead pine needles that cover the rough ground in a nice-smelling reddish carpet dig uncomfortably into her butt, but she doesn’t move. “Mabel, they’ll be fine. Better than fine, even! They’ll be so much happier when they’re fully part of the hive. And they won’t be able to stay mad once they understand.”

“They weren’t really mad,” Mabel hears herself saying, to her feet. “They were just scared. But - when everybody swarmed, for a second, I thought -”

She cuts herself off, buries her face a little farther into the collar of her sweater, like a turtle. A bright purple turtle. With a rainbow on the front.

“Why’s it so important to get everybody right  _now,_ anyway?” she asks, and Ford’s brow furrows. “Why can’t we talk to them? Give them some time to think about it? If being part of the hive is so great - and it totally is! - then why do we have to  _make_  them join instead of just telling them about how good it is and letting them come to us?”

“Unfortunately, people don’t always know what’s best for them,” Ford sighs. “As you’ve no doubt noticed.”

Mabel bites down on her bottom lip. “Yeahhhhhhh, but -” The image of a spritz bottle full of black liquid, of a jangling bell, flicker through her memory, but she can’t seem to figure out how they fit into anything. “When they’re so scared, it just seems kinda mean.”

“Sometimes, we have to be a little cruel to be kind.” Ford glances down at Mr. McGucket’s slumbering face, and Mabel realises how calm and peaceful he looks, like all his worries just got wiped away - and not by a memory gun. “Your friends will understand when they wake up.”

Mabel turns back to looking at her feet. 

It’s automatic, by now. She’s always reached for Dipper when she’s scared or upset, and he’s always done the same thing. She’s just starting to get used to doing it in her head, instead of with her arms. Just like she’s starting to get used to there being nothing there to grab hold of when she does.

She’s not expecting to feel a trickle of emotion in response.

Mabel sits straight up, nearly banging her head against the fake tree. Ford starts, staring blankly at her as she flaps the sleeves of her sweater in excitement. “Dipper’s back!”

“Dipper’s what?”

“They came  _back_! They’re at the Shack!” Mabel can’t contain herself, she leans over Mr. McGucket to grab Ford’s face in both hands, squishing his cheeks a little as she bonks their foreheads together. “See? Feel that? He’s connecting again! And he’s  _here!”_

She scrambles to her feet, holding out a hand to help Ford, who takes longer to push himself up on one knee and then stand. “C’mon! They were right by the Shack, they - they’re still there! Dipper hasn’t dropped out again - maybe it’s working! Maybe he’s finally actually bonding! Grunkle Ford, you don’t seem excited enough about this!”

“Of course I’m excited,” Ford protests. “This just seems - strange. Mabel, perhaps we should -”

“Whatever you were gonna say, save it,” Mabel interrupts. “I’ve got a brother to hug.”

She starts running before Grunkle Ford can stop her. It’s not far to the Mystery Shack.

...

Dipper knows Mabel’s coming before he sees her. It takes him a long time, too long, to realise just what it is he’s feeling.

It doesn’t take any time at all to figure out what it means.

Dipper throws the blanket aside and lunges for the door. He’s pulled up short, though, and glances back over his shoulder to see that Soos has grabbed him by the collar of his vest. “Soos, let go of me!”

“No can do,” Soos says apologetically, yanking Dipper back into the backseat. “Mr. Pines said to keep an eye on you, and I’m just gonna guess that probably includes making sure you don’t go all zombified and try to stop him. Sorry, dawg.”

“What?” Dipper stops trying to pull out of Soos’ grip, starts trying to twist around to look at him instead. “No, Soos, it’s Mabel! She’s headed this way, and if she gets into the Shack and finds Stan before -”

“Your mouth is saying that,” Soos says, rubbing his chin and squinting thoughtfully at Dipper, “but that big green starburst in your other eye’s saying, ‘Lock me in the car, Soos, or get ready to find out what alien mind-control feels like’.”

“What?” Dipper repeats, his train of thought derailing with a violent lurch. He cranes his neck to try to get a look at himself in the rearview mirror.

The reflection that looks back, sure enough, has one violently green eye and one brown eye with a jagged ring of green around the pupil. Dipper’s not sure if it’s just his imagination, but he thinks he can see it growing, just slightly.

The contented warmth pooled at the back of his mind swells, and for a moment, it’s not disgust or horror that gnaws at Dipper’s ribs at the sight of his own corrupted eyes, but a wash of relief.

Dipper shakes his head sharply, trying to shake the feeling off. “Sorry, Soos,” he says, and then, in one quick motion, unzips his vest and shucks it off, diving for the door.

He gets to the door before Soos can stop him, throwing it open and falling out onto the grass. Dipper scrambles to his feet and slams the door just as Soos dives after him. Soos smacks up against the window, his cheek pressed up against the glass as he fumbles with the handle. Dipper turns and runs for the Shack’s front door, but he’s pretty sure he hears, from behind him, a disappointed cry of, “Curse you, child lock!”

Mabel sees Dipper before he sees her. Dipper’s halfway to the porch when the burst of excited recognition pops in the back of his head. Despite everything, Dipper feels an answering kick of throat-clogging joy. 

That’s when the bright purple blur comes flying out of the trees and slams into Dipper, tackling him to the ground.

“Dipper!” Mabel shouts, throwing both arms around his neck and squeezing like she’s trying to choke him out. “DipperDipperDipperDipperDipper!”

“Ack - Mabel, I gotta breathe,” Dipper manages, but he hugs her back, as tight as he can.

“You’re back!” Mabel sits up, letting go of Dipper enough to get a good look at him, but it still somehow feels like she’s got him all wrapped up in an enormous hug. “We missed you so much! Did you figure out how to do the face thing? Wendy said you’d team up with her and beat me at catching birds but -”

“Whoa, Mabel, slow down!” Dipper laughs, propping himself up on his elbows. He can’t stop just  _looking_  at his twin, feeling her excitement and relief twining through his until he can’t tell who’s feeling what. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. They’re back together and the ragged hollow under his ribs is welling full of joy and love and the sky is so blue it hurts to look at.

Mabel shoots an enormous grin at Dipper and launches herself at him again. This time, she doesn’t knock him over, but it’s a near thing. The smell of her strawberry shampoo is almost overpowering, and the wool of her sweater is almost too warm under the blinding sun, but Dipper doesn’t pull away, leaning into Mabel’s shoulder and feeling like his whole body is just one huge sigh of relief.

For the first time since he woke up in the backseat of the Stanleymobile, everything is all right.

Mabel gives an agreeing hum and pats Dipper on the back in a way that’s probably supposed to be reassuring, though it feels a little more like she’s trying to get him to burp. She waits a full five seconds before blurting out, “How’d you convince Grunkle Stan to bring you back? Did you get him? How about Soos? Are they here too?”

“Oh, yeah. Soos is just back in the car and Stan went ahead into the Shack -” Dipper stops. He’d forgotten, for a moment, in the rush of finally seeing Mabel again, but he remembers now what Stan had gone in planning to do, and the knowledge trickles cold down his spine. 

He scrambles to his feet, and Mabel follows automatically before she even asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Stan’s going to try to destroy the hive,” Dipper says, over his shoulder, already starting up the porch stairs. The flash of Mabel’s shock and horror nearly bowls him over, but he doesn’t stop. There isn’t time.

“No way! Grunkle Stan would never -” Mabel starts, but her voice falters.

“Mabel, he tried to take me away, remember?”

Mabel bites her lower lip, looking down at her feet, and something churns uneasy in the pit of Dipper’s stomach. It doesn’t stop when she looks up, but her face is determined. “Wait up. If anybody can talk Grunkle Stan out of doing something stupid, it’s me.”

“Okay, but most of the time you’re the one who convinced him to do the stupid thing in the first place.”

“Exactly!” Mabel marches up the steps past Dipper, and sweeps through the door into the Shack. 

Dipper shakes his head, and follows her.

...

“Grunkle Stan! Don’t touch that elevator button!”

Stan stops at the bottom of the stairs, and turns, slowly, looking up. The expression on his face when his gaze falls on the twins almost makes Dipper’s anger ebb away. 

“Kids,” he says, and doesn’t say anything more. His voice is impossibly heavy.

“Don’t do this, Grunkle Stan,” Mabel says, darting down the steps to the lower landing. Dipper, following at a slower pace, sees Stan freeze up, pressing back against the elevator doors as Mabel skids to a halt in front of him. “It’s okay! Everybody’s fine, and happy - happier than they  _were_ , anyway - it’s - it’s a good thing! Please don’t take it away.”

If Stan notices the little wobble of uncertainty in her voice, he doesn’t mention it. Neither does Dipper, as he steps off the last stair to stand beside Mabel, arms crossed over his chest.

There’s a chill in the clammy air, a smell of wet metal and earth. Somewhere in the depths of the elevator shaft, something mechanical groans, its echoes drifting up to fill the stairwell.

“What’d you do to Soos,” Stan says, at last, like a ton of lead dropping on Dipper’s head. Dipper shrugs one shoulder, resenting the implication.

“Last I saw him he was trapped in the backseat of your car by the child lock. I’m pretty sure he’s still there.”

Stan’s brow furrows. “The Stanleymobile doesn’t have a child lock, kid. They didn’t invent that ‘til the eighties.”

“Okay, then Soos is just stuck in the car for some other - look, he’s fine, and he hasn’t been assimilated, which is what you’re  _really_  worried about, right?” Dipper has to bite down on everything he really wants to spit; it pools like venom in his mouth, tasting bitter, and Mabel reaches out and tangles her fingers in his even as she wraps slightly worried fluff around his thoughts. “Because you’re just too scared of anything new or strange or  _weird_  to stop and think that maybe this could be a good thing.”

“Feels like we’ve already had this conversation once or twice,” Stan says, absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck, and it sounds like he’s starting to get his voice back under control. He actually sounds almost nonchalant now. “And I think you’re forgetting who sobbed in my arms for fifteen solid minutes just thinkin’ about becomin’ what  _you_  are.”

Mabel sucks in a horrified breath, and Dipper feels his cheeks go hot. “Dipper -”

“ _It was only_  because it all reminded me too much of - of Bill,” he mutters, sharply. “And I’m  _fine_  now.” Mabel’s fluff just grows more worried, so he repeats, “I’m fine.”

Stan cocks an eyebrow at that, levelling a clearly skeptical look in Dipper’s direction, and suddenly Dipper is done with this conversation. Arguing with the old man isn’t going to work, anyway. Dipper himself is living proof of that. They’ll just have to show him, by force if they have to.

For some reason, though, he can feel Mabel’s reluctance bleeding over into his own thoughts.

“We can’t let you hurt the queen,” Dipper says, as much to remind Mabel as to warn Stan.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Stan says, and his voice is is almost jaunty now. “Because if that’s what I gotta do to get you kids back, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

The bare bulb of the light buzzes and sputters overhead, its dim light lending a greenish, underwater cast to the stairwell.

“You could join us,” Mabel blurts, and Stan gives her a sad smile.

“Sorry, pumpkin. I don’t think a hivemind’s really for me.”

“But you’d love it so much!” There’s an edge of frenzy pushing at the back of Dipper’s thoughts now, and he’s not sure if it’s coming from Mabel or just bleeding into the desperation in her voice. “I mean it! You’ve always got friends, you always feel how much everybody loves you - you’d never be lonely ever again, and - and there’s this neat thing we can do with our faces that I bet would really scare the pants off of Summerween trick-or-treaters -”

“Yeah, think I’ve seen it,” Stan says, with an exaggerated shudder, cutting off Mabel’s voice before it can rise into a register only dogs can hear. 

Dipper realises his hands are clenched into fists. Why are they still standing around talking? There’s a press against his throat that he realises dazedly must be spores itching to be released. What’s holding him back?

He glances over at Mabel, and is shocked to see she’s shaking.

“We’re gonna turn you anyway,” she says, quietly, and Dipper feels her reluctance in his own mind, slowly blooming into frozen horror. “We can’t let you do anything to the queen - Grunkle Stan, I don’t wanna hurt you!”

Stan’s voice is gentler than Dipper had ever expected to hear, like somebody talking to a scared animal. “Mabel, sweetie, if you don’t want to, then  _don’t_.”

Mabel shakes her head. 

Dipper’s fists are itching to move. The muscles under his face are just plain itching. He’s shivering with energy, with this compulsive urge to  _move_  and  _do something_  and  _keep the hive safe_ , but Mabel’s reluctance - and her growing fear - hold him pinned in place. Mabel’s upset, and that means something here is  _wrong_.

“It’ll be better,” Mabel says, to herself, more like she’s trying to convince herself than Stan. “Everything will be better.”

Stan’s jaw clenches, and then relaxes. He takes one cautious step forward, reaching out to rest a hand on Mabel’s shoulder, and it takes everything in Dipper not to lash out and rip Stan’s arm from its socket. 

The thought makes Dipper stop, take a mental step back. Where’s all this anger even coming from?

“Mabel,” Stan says, low and as soft as somebody with a voice like Stan’s can manage. “Sweetie, you’ve always trusted me. I never coulda thanked you enough for that.”

Dipper wants to scream at Mabel to get Stan  _now_ , while he’s close, while he’s vulnerable, but something keeps his jaw locked. He only watches, feeling wave after wave of terrified fury crash against him like he’s a rock they’re slowly wearing away into the sea.

“So this time,” Stan goes on, pulling away and stepping back towards the elevator just as the doors slide open with a cheerful  _ding!_ , “I’m trusting you.”

He steps into the elevator, the one that’s going to take him down into the lab where the queen is hidden, helpless and defenseless. The queen who connects them all. The queen he’s planning to kill.

The last resistance that had been holding Dipper back crumbles. 

He lunges for the elevator doors as they start to slide shut again, grabbing one with each hand and forcing them back open. Stan stares back, startled but not, as far as Dipper can tell, afraid. “Kid,” he starts, “you don’t wanna do this.”

“Oh yeah I do,” Dipper says, and opens his mouth -

Something grabs him around the waist, pulls him backwards out of the elevator doors, and spins him around to fling him onto the stairs. All the air is forced out of Dipper’s lungs in one long burst, and he struggles to suck in another breath.

Mabel is standing in front of the elevator, the light behind her casting a sinister shadow over her face in which only the glow of her eyes is clearly visible.She’s breathing hard, knees bent and arms outstretched in a stance that makes Dipper think of sumo wrestlers. 

“I won’t,” she says, loud and vehement and clear, and the miasma at the back of Dipper’s mind  _seethes_. “I won’t hurt Grunkle Stan, and I won’t make him join, and I won’t let you either, I don’t care what you do -”

She stops, abruptly. Dipper just has time to see her eyes dim, to feel the horrible emptiness radiate from where just a moment ago there was all her fear and anger and love and doubt, before, unceremoniously, she collapses to the floor.

The furious compulsion is still battering at the back of Dipper’s brain, but it couldn’t make him move even if he’d wanted to. He’s stuck, transfixed, staring at the little dark heap that is Mabel.

The elevator doors start to slide shut, and Stan rams his hand against a button on the inside, making them rattle open again. Dipper somehow manages to pick himself up and cross the two strides between him and his twin, kneeling beside her without looking up at Stan. Mabel’s chest is rising and falling, oh so very shallowly, but she’s so still.

“Kid...” Stan says, trailing off in the middle of his own sentence.

“I might not be able to harm the queen,” Dipper says, hearing his own voice like it’s coming out of somebody else’s mouth. He feels strangely numb, like he’s just been dipped in icewater and dropped back into the basement frozen. “But nothing’s gonna stop me from making sure Mabel’s all right.”

The elevator doors stand open, spilling grimy fluorescent light over the purple of Mabel’s sweater. Dipper slams a fist against the rough concrete floor, trying to concentrate on the pain and not the rising tide of fury and fear that wants to drive him to his feet. “Go! Before it gets me again!”

It seems like an eternity, but the elevator doors finally slide closed again, swallowing the light. The mechanical sounds start up again, deep in the bowels of the basement, as the elevator sinks, leaving Dipper alone in the artificial twilight with Mabel’s - he doesn’t want to think ‘body’.

The storm of crashing, whirling, churning emotion is making it hard to concentrate, to focus. Dipper reaches out to turn Mabel over, onto her back, but stops himself before he even touches her. If she’s hurt herself, won’t moving her cause more damage?

He settles, at last, for tucking two fingers against her neck just under her chin, looking for a pulse. Dipper can’t seem to find one, but that might have more to do with the panic squeezing his ribs closed and the way the world is starting to swim around him than whether or not Mabel actually has a pulse.

He can’t tell what’s his own fear and anger, what’s coming from what had been a comforting warmth at the back of his mind. Now it’s just screaming, and Dipper can’t tell if he’s more furiously, murderously angry at Stan or the hive or himself.

It feels like his brain is on fire. Like it’s burning, crackling and withering within his peeling, melting skull.

His vision blurs, dims.

...

 

...

“Whoa, I just had the craziest dream,” Mabel says. 

Dipper tries to open his eyes, but it feels like his eyelids are stuck together. He raises a hand to rub them off, lets it flop across his face. Everything feels like it’s been pumped full of lead.

He groans.

“Wait, why are we in the basement?” Mabel asks, somewhere to Dipper’s left. “Whoa, ew!”

Dipper tries rubbing at his eyes again. Something flakes off against his hand, and he manages to pry his eyes open.

Mabel’s starting to sit up, leaning on her elbows and staring down at a puddle of something green and goopy on the cold concrete where her head must’ve been lying a moment before. There’s trails of something the same colour streaking her face, leading across her cheek from one nostril and the corner of her eye, like - like it had leaked out of her head while she was lying down.

As Dipper watches, Mabel reaches out and pokes it with one finger. “Gross!” she exclaims, sounding anything but grossed out. She looks over at Dipper, her eyes big and brown and thankfully normal. “Wait, that wasn’t a dream, was it?”

Dipper lets out a long sigh of relief and lets his eyes sink closed again.

...

“I found it in the buried spaceship,” Ford says. “I think we may have woken it up last summer when we accidentally armed the security bots. I believe it must have been dormant through the winter, and then worked its way out with the thaw.” 

“Well, whatever it was, it sure didn’t like your acetylene torch,” Stan says, with a cackle that sounds just a little too proud. “Shoulda seen that sucker flame!”

Ford clears his throat, looking down at his mug of Mabel-made hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and glitter. “I should have -”

“Yeah, yeah, you shoulda torched it as soon as you got it downstairs, you shoulda squished it back in the spaceship, we’ve all heard it. You thought you were helping, poindexter. We all came out fine, so just quit beatin’ yourself up about it.” Stan crosses his arms, leans back in the armchair. “You’re makin’ me miss Trev’s confession to Nicola.”

Ford huffs out a sound that’s almost a laugh. “Of course.” His voice is tinged with teasing amusement. “Don’t let me keep you from your incredibly important episode of Resignation Street.”

“Hey, I just saved the world for the second time,” Stan says. “I think I’m owed a little downtime.”

“Dipper?” Mabel says, drawing Dipper’s attention back to the game board spread out across the floor between them. “It’s your roll, sleepyhead.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry,” Dipper says, scooping up the dice and shaking them in one hand. “Wait, was I the pink or the purple?”

“ _Dipper_ ,” Mabel sighs, exasperated, but she’s smiling. “You’re the blue guy. See? The one alllll the way back at the start?”

“Stan’s rubbing off on you way too much,” Wendy says. She doesn’t even look up from her magazine, kicking her legs over the arm of the couch absentmindedly as she flips a page. “You totally moved Dipper’s token while he was distracted by Ford’s story.”

“What? Would I, Mabel Pines, loving sister and undisputed champion of all things board game, ever cheat my dear, sweet brother out of a win at Parcheezwhiz?” Mabel beams hugely, twisting back and forth to look at the others gathered around the TV.

“Yeah, you definitely would,” Wendy says, from behind her magazine, and Soos nods in agreement. 

Mabel shrugs, then reaches over the board and moves Dipper’s token up several squares.

There’s a sound just on the edge of hearing, and Dipper turns to see what it is. Mabel leans around him, following his line of sight, and her whole face lights up from inside, an enormous grin spreading across her face.

“Waddles!” she shouts, and scrambles to her feet, knocking over the game board as she dashes out of the living room.

“Mabel -” Dipper calls after her, looking at the ruined game, and then shrugs himself.

Mabel’s out on the porch, kneeling with both arms draped around her pig’s neck and her face buried in Waddles’ shoulder when Dipper opens the front door. At first, Dipper thinks she’s sobbing, but then she looks up and he can see her shoulders are shaking from laughter. Waddles looks up too, and, seeing Dipper, gives a delighted  _hwoinch!_  

“He came back!” Mabel crows, pulling her pig closer to her and giving him a squeeze that draws a startled grunt out of him. “Waddles came back!”

The pig in question leans forwards to snuffle his nose against Mabel’s cheek, and she bursts into laughter all over again.

Dipper’s smiling as he sits down beside her, reaching up to give Waddles a scratch on the top of his head. He doesn’t turn around at the sound of footsteps behind him, just smiles a little wider at the succession of pops and creaks and complaints as Grunkle Stan crouches down to stare at the pig as well.

“Place isn’t the same without this little guy rooting around,” he declares, finally, which is hilarious because Waddles hasn’t been a ‘little guy’ since Mabel used the size-changing crystals to sneak him onto the bus. “Glad to see his pink porky face around again.”

He straightens up with a grunt, but not before clapping both Dipper and Mabel on the shoulder, one hand each. It’s just a moment of pressure, of warmth. It’s nothing like the constant hum of loving presence that had filled Dipper’s head.

Somehow, it seems all the better for it.

Dipper scoots over to lean against Mabel’s shoulder, within range of Waddles’ piggy kisses. The sun is sinking through the trees, rosy pink and amber, its warmth slowly fading as the fingerling shadows of trees stretch towards the Shack. Dipper lets out a sigh, feeling the tension drain from his back and shoulders as he lets the cool evening breeze ruffle his hair, carrying faint birdcall from the trees. There’s more shuffling and stomping behind them, Wendy’s calm assessment of “oh man, that’s a nice sunset,” Ford’s quiet agreement, and Soos’ assertion that the only thing that could improve on it would be if, like, a tiger was holding it in its mouth, doods, and the tiger was also on fire, signalling that the rest of the family have spilled out onto the porch.

Dipper leans over, and gently knocks his head against Mabel’s. She leans her head on his in turn, and he doesn’t need an alien mental link to know she’s just as content as he is. Their family are all safe and gathered close around them, and there’s plenty of summer still ahead.

The stillness is only broken when Mabel says, “I wonder if we can still do the face thing.”


End file.
